New Hampshire Supreme Court cannot force a clemency hearing for Pamela Smart
Mar. 29—The New Hampshire Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by Pamela Smart that the court require the governor and Executive Council to reconsider her request for a hearing that might shorten her life sentence and result in release on parole.
Smart, 55, was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in the death of her husband, Gregg Smart, at a 1991 trial in Rockingham County Superior Court. Since then, the former media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School has been in prison in New York state.
In the court's ruling Wednesday, justices said they have no legal jurisdiction to compel the state's executive branch to grant Smart's petition for a commutation hearing or any say in how that hearing must be conducted.
"We conclude that the petitioner seeks a ruling on a political, nonjusticiable question," the court wrote in its opinion.
Smart's attorney argued before the state Supreme Court that the governor and council's minutes-long discussion before they turned down Smart's request last year did not constitute a fair assessment of whether a hearing should be granted.
Mark Sisti urged the court to order the Executive Council to hold "a meaningful due process hearing that we even get at the Department of Motor Vehicles."
Smart and Sisti contend that she is ready to re-enter society. Sisti, who has been Smart's lawyer since her original trial 32 years ago, has submitted extensive testimony in support of her rehabilitation and abbreviating her sentence. He has vowed to continue his appeal.
"It has to do with the liberty of a citizen of the state of New Hampshire who's in exile in the state of New York now for the rest of her life," he said. Sisti said he has submitted "thousands of pages" of testimony, correspondence, and certificates of a master's and a doctorate degree.
Smart has spent more than half her life in prison since being convicted in 1991 as an accomplice to her husband's murder. She was 22 in 1990 when she was accused of orchestrating the murder of 24-year-old Gregg Smart with the help of her 15-year-old lover, William "Billy" Flynn, and three of his teenage friends, who tried to make the fatal shooting in the Smarts' Derry home look like a botched robbery.
The plot unraveled, and the trial attracted worldwide interest.
The Executive Council has denied Smart's request for a commutation hearing three times, most recently in March 2022.
Sisti said the Executive Council took two minutes and 34 seconds at its 2022 meeting to consider her clemency hearing request.
Smart was sentenced to life without a possibility of parole after a jury convicted her of accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with a witness in connection with the shooting death of her husband, to whom she'd been married for less than a year.
Flynn, who fired the murder weapon, was released in 2015 after serving nearly 25 years behind bars. Patrick Randall, who held a knife to Gregg Smart's face, was paroled in June 2015.
Smart appealed her conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.
She filed her first petition for commutation in 2004 and remains behind bars at the maximum-security prison in Bedford Hills, New York.
