Pamela Smart case hard to shake

death of her husband Greg Smart. She was sentenced to life without parole. She is now 55.

Her trial, held at the Rockingham County Superior Courthouse in Brentwood, became one of the first in the U.S. to allow TV cameras into the courtroom. Back then, we didn’t have cellphones or the world wide web. Just about everyone in the Granite State was glued to their televisions, especially if there was one to watch at work, in a restaurant or at a bar, and the same could be said around the United States and the world. It was a big deal.

I was working in radio news at the time and covering the story. The trial had juicy details that were made for Hollywood: A pretty school staff member is having a sexual affair with her teenage student, 15, and allegedly orchestrates a plot for him and his friends to kill her husband.

Some would argue that the crime was media-sensationalized with negative, pretrial portrayals of Smart, which affected the judge and jury. It’s possible, but I don’t see how the incriminating evidence presented in court from the police wire that student Cecilia Pierce wore implicating Smart could be ignored.

Her mother, Linda

Wojas, and her family have never given up the fight. In a 2016 interview for NH Magazine with veteran news reporter Nancy West, Wojas had strong words for the late Judge Douglas Gray who presided over the trial.

“He denied my daughter Pam her constitutional right to a fair trial,” Wojas said, alluding to the “media circus” that surrounded the trial. “You don’t invite the world into your courtroom and then not put in the safeguards for every defendant — for you, me and everyone. And, when that happened, everyone in New Hampshire lost, not just my daughter.”

Over the years, Pamela Smart has exhausted just about every legal option out there for a chance at freedom, but last Tuesday, her longtime defense attorney, Mark Sisti, asked the Granite State’s highest court to have Gov. Chris Sununu’s Executive Council reconsider Smart’s re

quest for a commutation hearing to potentially reduce her sentence. He believes that she was robbed of due process last March and that the Executive Council didn’t do its job.

A ruling from the four justices could be announced in a month or more. The fifth justice recused