Pamela Smart asks court to approve commutation hearing
Feb. 14—Pamela Smart should get another hearing before the Executive Council on commuting her current prison sentence because councilors didn't do their job when they reviewed a previous request last year, her attorney told the state's highest court Tuesday.
Smart's attorney, Mark Sisti, urged the New Hampshire Supreme Court to order the Executive Council to hold "a meaningful due process hearing that we even get at the Department of Motor Vehicles."
But Senior Assistant Attorney General Laura Lombardi said the court lacks jurisdiction to decide whether to order a new hearing that could free Smart from prison after three decades.
"Again, this does not have to do with justice," she said. "This has to do with mercy."
No decision was immediately announced.
Smart, 55, has spent more than half her life in prison since being convicted in 1991 as an accomplice to the murder of her husband, Gregg Smart.
She was 22 in 1990 when she was accused of orchestrating her husband's murder with the help of a 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 ensuing 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 request.
"Give Pam Smart that little inkling, that little crack in the door where she can have hope," Sisti said.
Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi said she is not aware that the Executive Council has to "write a fulsome opinion" or that a requirement exists for councilors to review the materials submitted or "articulate the reasons for their decision."
Another justice wondered whether Smart's best remedy might be to ask a different group of elected councilors.
"You're saying they're not doing their job, but isn't that ultimately the decision of the voters?" asked Associate Justice James Bassett. "And here, you can't point to anything, to say, this is what they were supposed to do. This is what they were supposed to do and they didn't do it."
Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, who served as New Hampshire attorney general from 2017 to 2021, recused himself from Tuesday's session on Smart's case.
Hours before justices heard her request, Smart spoke on the phone from prison with ABC's "Nightline."
"I am asking for mercy and compassion," Smart reportedly said.
A half-dozen people attended the hearing clad in T-shirts saying "Team Pamela Smart" and "Enough Is Enough!!!"
Kelly Harnett, who was close friends with Smart in prison, was surprised that the justices asked tough questions of both sides.
"I am more optimistic than I thought I would be coming out of there," Harnett said in a phone interview afterward.
Harnett, who lives in Queens, N.Y., said she believes Smart will be freed one day and said keeping her incarcerated serves no purpose.
"First and foremost, she's been like a saint to everyone at Bedford Hills," the women's prison in New York where Smart has lived for years, Harnett said.
"She never gives up. Her resilience and perseverance is like no other. She's the strongest person I ever met in my life."
Smart was sentenced to life without parole after being convicted by a Rockingham County jury in 1991 of accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and tampering with a witness in connection with the shooting death of her 24-year-old husband, to whom she had been married for less than a year.
Smart received a sentence of life without possibility of parole. She remains behind bars at the maximum-security prison in Bedford Hills.
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.
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. Vance Lattime, who provided the vehicle and gun, was paroled in August 2015. Raymond Fowler, who was present during the killing, was paroled in 2003.
