CONCORD, N.H. (WHDH) - Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire woman who is serving a life sentence for plotting with her teenage student to kill her husband, has for the first time accepted responsibility for her husband’s death.
Smart has been behind bars for more than three decades.
In a video statement on Tuesday, she requested a meeting with New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu to ask him to commute her sentence. Her mother later spoke with 7NEWS, saying to Sununu “Please return my daughter to us, she’s innocent.”
“I’m respectfully asking for the opportunity to come before you, the New Hampshire Executive Council, and have an honest conversation with you about my incarceration, my acceptance of responsibility, and any concerns you might have, any questions,” Smart said.
Smart said she hopes to showcase what she feels is her rehabilitation while in prison.
“I desperately didn’t want to be responsible for my husband’s murder,” she said. “I had to acknowledge for the first time in my own mind and my own heart how responsible I was.”
Smart was working as a high school media coordinator when one of her student’s shot and killed her husband, Gregory, in Derry, New Hampshire.
Now 56-years-old, Smart was convicted of being an accomplice to first degree murder, among other charges, in 1991 and was transferred to a women’s prison in New York. She was 22-years-old at the time.
The student who killed Gregory Smart was 15-years-old when he shot Gregory and was freed from prison in 2015.
Pamela Smart has been sentenced to life without parole. She has requested a commutation on four occasions, with her last appeal being denied in 2023.
Sununu responded to Smart’s latest request late Tuesday morning, saying in a statement “New Hampshire’s process for commutation or pardon requests is fair and thorough.”
“Pamela Smart will be given the same opportunity to petition the Council for a hearing as any other individual,” Sununu said.
In the hours after the release of Smart’s video, 7NEWS spoke with Smart’s mother, Linda Wojas.
“I’m always hopeful for fairness,” Wojas said.
Wojas, 83, said her daughter is a different person than the person she was in 1991.
“I think we all are,” Wojas said. “We grow, hopefully, and we learn.”
Officials at the New York prison where Smart has been housed describe her in documents as a model prisoner.
Her resume includes tutoring inmates, earning a PhD in biblical studies and masters degrees in literature and law.
“She continues to help everybody and she does God’s work in there,” Wojas said. “And that’s a beautiful thing.”
While there is no timetable for any decision from Sununu, some say proceedings may be put on hold until next year when a new governor of New Hampshire will be sworn in.
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