BOSTON (AP) — Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage student in 1990, is seeking to overturn her conviction over what her lawyers claim were several constitutional violations.
The petition for habeas corpus relief was filed Monday in New York, where she is being held at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and, in New Hampshire, where the murder happened.
“Ms. Smart’s trial unfolded in an environment that no court had previously confronted — wall-to-wall media coverage that blurred the line between allegation and evidence,” Jason Ott, who is part of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition challenges whether a fair adversarial process took place.”
The move comes about seven months after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte rejected a request for a sentence reduction hearing. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it was not deserving of a hearing.
A spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said it would have no comment about the petition.
A spokeman for New Hampshire’s attorney general said it would not comment on pending litigation “other than to note that the State maintains Ms. Smart received a fair trial and that her convictions were lawfully obtained and upheld on appeal.”
In their petition, lawyers for the 57-year-old Smart argue that prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of Ms. Smart that included words that were not audible on the recordings. Among the words they claim weren't audible but in the transcript were the word killed in the sentence “you had your husband killed," the word busted in the sentence “I'm gonna be busted" and the word murder in the sentence “this would have been the perfect murder.”
“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown,” Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement. “Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.”
Lawyers also argued the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by the media attention and due to faulty instructions to the jury. They argued jurors were told they must find that Smart acted with premeditation, not told they must consider only evidence presented at trial.
They also argued the trial court gave her a mandatory life sentence without parole for being an accomplice to first-degree murder, despite New Hampshire not mandating that sentence for the charge.
Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The shooter was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.
It took until 2024 for Smart to take full responsibility for her husband’s death. In a video released in June, she said she spent years deflecting blame “almost as if it was a coping mechanism.”
Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him she needed her husband killed because she feared she would lose everything if they divorced and that she threatened to break up with him if he didn't kill her husband. Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors and all have since been released.
Flynn and 17-year-old Patrick Randall entered the Smarts’ Derry condominium and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the foyer. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn fired a hollow-point bullet into his head. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life. They were granted parole in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison sentences and have been released.
The case inspired Joyce Maynard’s 1992 book “To Die For” and the 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
FILE - Pamela Smart answers questions from the defense in her murder conspiracy trial, March 18, 1991, in Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter, N.H. (AP Photo/Jon Pierre Lasseigne, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s strong start to the year slowed. The S&P 500 slipped 0.3% Wednesday for its first loss in four days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.9% from its own record set the day before, while the Nasdaq composite added 0.2%. Some of the market’s sharpest drops hit industries that President Donald Trump targeted for criticism. Homebuilders fell after Trump suggested moves to prevent large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, in hopes of making it more affordable for people to buy houses.. Crude oil prices fell, and Treasury yields swung in the bond market following mixed reports on the U.S. economy.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s strong start to the year is slowing on Wednesday.
The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged in late trading, coming off its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 332 points, or 0.7%, from its own record set the day before, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite was up 0.5%, with a little less than an hour remaining in trading.
Homebuilders fell sharply after President Donald Trump suggested moves to prevent large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, hoping to make it more affordable for people to buy houses. The potential removal of some buyers for homes sent the stock prices of both PulteGroup and D.R. Horton down 3.1%.
Blackstone, a large investment company, briefly fell more than 9%, but it quickly pared its loss to a drop of 4.8%.
Moves across the rest of the U.S. stock market were mostly quiet, including for Warner Bros. Discovery after it again rejected a buyout bid from Paramount and told its shareholders to stick with a rival offer from Netflix.
Warner Bros. Discovery rose 0.3%, while Paramount Skydance fell 1.5% and Netflix added 0.6%.
In the oil market, crude prices fell after Trump said that Venezuela would provide 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude dropped 2% to $55.99. Brent crude, the international standard, fell a more modest 1.2% to settle at $59.96 per barrel.
Any additional oil flowing from Venezuela into the global system would push down on crude prices by increasing their supplies. Prices for oil have swung this week following Trump’s weekend ouster of the president of Venezuela, which is likely sitting on some of the largest deposits of oil in the world.
Oil prices had already fallen back to where they were in 2021, before Trump's move against Venezuela, because of expectations of plentiful supplies. To pull much more oil from Venezuela's ground would likely require big investments to improve aging infrastructure.
In the bond market, Treasury yields swung following several mixed reports on the U.S. economy. One of the most impactful said that growth for U.S. retailers, finance companies and other businesses in the services sectors accelerated by more last month than economists expected.
Not only that, the report from the Institute for Supply Management also said that a measure of inflation eased to its lowest level since March.
To be sure, company executives are still saying they're feeling pressures from inflation and an uncertain economy. “In general, business is flat,” one business in the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry told the ISM. “Value brands are still experiencing higher demand. But premium brands struggle to maintain market share.”
But any improvements will nevertheless sound good to officials at the Federal Reserve, who are trying to shore up the job market while pushing down on inflation, which has stubbornly remained above the Fed's 2% target.
Separate reports Thursday on the job market offered a mixed view. One said that employers cut back on the number of job openings they were advertising, while a second suggested that employers outside of the government added 41,000 more jobs last month than they cut.
A much more comprehensive look at the health of the U.S. job market will arrive on Friday from the U.S. Labor Department.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.13% from 4.18% late Tuesday following Wednesday's economic reports. But the two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Fed will do, held steadier. It edged down to 3.46% from 3.47% from late Tuesday.
The hope on Wall Street is that the economy remains solid enough to avoid a recession but not so strong that it keeps the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates. The Fed cut its main interest rate three times last year to shore up the slowing job market, but it’s indicated fewer cuts may be ahead because inflation remains high.
Traders are betting on a less than 12% chance that the Fed will cut interest rates at its next meeting later this month. That's down slightly from the day before, according to data from CME Group.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed among some sharp moves across Europe and Asia.
Indexes dropped 0.7% in London, 0.9% in Hong Kong and 1.1% in Tokyo, while rising 0.6% in Seoul.
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
Options trader Joseph D'Arrigo works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Joseph Stevens works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Anthony Spina works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Steven Rodriguez works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
People walk in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's stock prices at a securities firm Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person stands in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei index at a securities firm Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
