Pamela Smart - Trial

Trial

Smart's trial was widely watched and garnered considerable media attention; she faced life in prison if convicted. When oral argument commenced March 4, 1991, Assistant Attorney General Diane Nicolosi portrayed the teenagers as naive victims of an "evil woman bent on murder." The prosecution portrayed Pamela Smart as the cold-blooded mastermind who controlled her young lover. Nicolosi claimed that Smart seduced Flynn to get him to murder her husband, so that she could avoid an expensive divorce and benefit from a $140,000 life insurance policy. In her testimony, Smart acknowledged that she had had an affair with the teenager, but claimed that the murder of her husband was solely the doing of Flynn and his friends, born as a reaction to her telling Flynn that she wished to end their relationship and repair her marriage. She insisted that she neither participated in the murder plot nor had any foreknowledge of it. Though Flynn claimed he had fallen in love with Smart when he first met her, Cecilia Pierce was to testify at trial that Smart and Flynn were originally just friends. She first noticed a change around February, when Smart confessed to Pierce that she "loved Bill." Flynn claims that he was a virgin before he had sex with Pamela Smart.

Smart was found guilty on March 22, 1991 in the Rockingham County Superior Court after a 14-day trial, of "being an accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and witness tampering". This was largely as a result of the testimony of her conspirators and secretly taped conversations in which Smart appeared to contradict her claims of having wanted to reconcile with her husband and of having no knowledge of the boys' plot. Smart argued that the media had influenced her trial and conviction. She could have been charged with capital murder, but the prosecution decided against it. Later that day she was given a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility for parole.