‘To Die For’ inspiration Pamela Smart will stay in prison after losing final appeal at Supreme Court
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Pamela Smart will not have another chance to have her life sentence commuted, a state Supreme Court ruled.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court denied Smart's appeal on Wednesday A favourable ruling would have forced a state board to reconsider her argument for early release.
Smart, 55, has already served 30 years of a life-without-parole sentence relating to the murder of her husband in 1990. At the time, Smart was 22 and was working at a school, where she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy.
The teen, William Flynn, shot and killed Smart's husband, Gregory Smart. Prosecutors wrapped Smart up in the crime, convicting her on conspiracy charges relating to the murder plot. She maintains that she was not aware of Flynn's murderous intentions.
Her case was highly publicised and eventually inspired the film “To Die For.”
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled it did not have jurisdiction to impose procedural standards on a state agency.
"Because imposing procedural rules or standards upon the executive branch in the commutation process would violate the separation of powers doctrine, we dismiss the Rule 11 petition for lack of jurisdiction," NHSC Justice Patrick Donovan wrote in the opinion.
The state previously denied three of Smart's requests for sentence commutation, and her attorney, Mark Sisti, accused the state's review board of spending less than three minutes considering her appeal for early release.
