Pamela Smart, serving a life sentence, accepts full responsibility for husband's death in videotaped statement

 

Pamela Smart, serving a life sentence for plotting with her teenage student to have her husband killed in 1990, accepted full responsibility for his death for the first time in a videotaped statement released Tuesday. The statement is part of her latest request for a sentence reduction. Smart, now 56, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later shot and killed her husband, Gregory Smart. The boy was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Smart had denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes, resulting in a life sentence without parole.

In her statement, Smart revealed that she began to “dig deeper into her own responsibility” through her experience in a writing group that “encouraged us to go beyond and to spaces that we didn't want to be in.” She expressed how difficult it was to confront her responsibility, stating, “For me, that was really hard because going into those places, in those spaces is where I found myself responsible for something I desperately didn't want to be responsible for—my husband's murder.” With her voice quavering, she admitted, “I had to acknowledge for the first time in my own mind and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had deflected blame all the time, I think, almost as if it was a coping mechanism, because the truth of being so responsible was very difficult for me.” Read more......