Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence, takes responsibility for the first time for the murder of her husband in 1990

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Pamela Smart is serving a life sentence for plotting with her teenage student to murder her husband in 1990. In a videotaped statement released Tuesday that was part of her latest request to reduce her sentence, she took full responsibility for his death for the first time.

Smart, 56, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire. The gunman was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year prison sentence. Although Pamela Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was found guilty of complicity in premeditated murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Smart has been in prison for nearly 34 years. In her videotaped testimony, she said her experience in a writing group made her “start to think more deeply about my own responsibility.” “The group encouraged us to go beyond ourselves and go to places we didn’t want to be.”

“It was really hard for me because when I went to those places I became responsible for something that I absolutely did not want to be responsible for: the murder of my husband,” she said, her voice shaking. “I had to recognize for the first time in my own mind and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had been denying the blame the whole time, almost as if it was a coping mechanism, because the truth of being so responsible was very difficult for me to accept.”

She asked for an “honest conversation” with New Hampshire’s five-member Executive Council, which approves state contracts and appointments to courts and state agencies, and with the governor. Chris Sununu. Smart has exhausted all appeals available to her and must go to the council for a change of sentence. The council denied her final, third request in 2022, and Smart appealed to the state Supreme Court, which denied her request last year.

Val Fryatt, a cousin of Gregory Smart, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that Smart had “beat around the bush” and taken full responsibility “without admitting the facts that made her ‘fully responsible.'”

Fryatt noted that Smart did not mention her cousin’s name “once” in the video.

Messages seeking comment on the petition and statement were sent to council members, Sununu and the Attorney General’s office.

“New Hampshire’s process for requesting commutation or pardon is fair and thorough,” Sununu’s office said in a statement. “Pamela Smart will be given the same opportunity to request a hearing with the council as any other person.”

“I will look into it, it is not on my radar screen at this time,” City Councilor Joseph Kenney responded in an email.

Smart is serving her sentence at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York. She earned a doctorate in theology and three master’s degrees behind bars. She has also taught fellow inmates, been ordained as a minister and served on an inmate liaison committee. She said she regrets her actions and has been rehabilitated.

“I made excuses, dismissed my own involvement, and blamed everyone but myself,” Smart wrote in her letter to Sununu. Because she wasn’t there the night of the murder and didn’t pull the trigger, she thought she wasn’t responsible and said she was “comfortable with my twisted logic.”

She added: “I am the one responsible for his absence from this world.”

Mark Sisti, Smart’s longtime attorney, said the motion was filed last week.

“We’re trying to make it clear to the governor and the council that we believe now is the time to really listen to her,” he said. “If they have questions, she’s more than happy to answer them.”

Her petition was accompanied by nearly 30 letters of support, many of them from prison officials.

“She is the true definition of a rehabilitated, improved and cultured human being,” wrote York State Assembly member Edward Gibbs in his March 14 letter.

The trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases in America involving a sexual affair between a school employee and a student. Joyce Maynard wrote To Die For in 1992, referring to the Smart case. This film inspired a 1995 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix. The murderer, William Flynn, and three other teenagers cooperated with the prosecution. They served shorter prison sentences and have since been released.

Flynn testified that Smart told him she had to kill her husband because she feared losing everything in a divorce. He said she threatened to break up with him if he didn’t kill Gregory Smart.