CONCORD, N.H. — Lawyers for Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating the murder of her husband at the hands of her teenage student in 1990, urged a New Hampshire judge Monday to allow her latest request for a new trial to move forward.

Smart, 58, 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, in Derry.

The shooter was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accessory to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison without parole after a trial that was one of the first in the country to be broadcast live on television from start to finish.

Smart filed a habeas corpus petition in January seeking to overturn his conviction for what his attorneys claim were several constitutional violations. The state responded with a motion to dismiss the petition, resulting in Monday’s hearing, which Smart attended remotely from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York.

Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy took the matter into consideration. He planned to govern in 30 to 60 days.

Smart’s attorneys argue that prosecutors misled jurors by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded Smart conversations that included words that were not audible on the recordings.

Among the words they claim were not audible but in the transcript were the word “killed” in the sentence “you had your husband killed,” the word “arrested” in the sentence “They are going to arrest me,” and the word “murder” in the sentence “this would have been the perfect murder.”

“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: When people are given a script, they inevitably listen to the words they are shown,” Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement earlier this year. “The jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently; they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.”

In court Monday, he described a forensic study that showed that providing transcripts along with muffled audio leads listeners to believe the written text even when it is inaccurate.

“Adding a transcript of the language to jurors changed their interpretation of what they thought they were hearing, their confidence in what they thought they were hearing and how clear it was to them,” he said. “There’s no absolute truth about what’s on the tapes. There’s nothing decipherable on the tapes. But when you tell someone what they’re hearing, you set this expectation… and they’ll listen.”

Smart’s attorneys also argued that the verdict was clouded by media attention and erroneous jury instructions. They argued that jurors were told they must determine that Smart acted with premeditation, and were not told they must consider only the evidence presented at trial.

They also argued that the trial court imposed a mandatory life sentence without parole on him for being an accessory to first-degree murder, even though New Hampshire did not require that sentence for the charge.

Lawyers for the state asked the judge to dismiss the petition, saying almost all of the claims are precluded because they were already raised on appeal and resolved by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, or could have been raised on appeal before the court but were not.

They noted that during Smart’s trial, the defense only expressed concern that transcripts of the recordings allegedly did not take into account “doubling” of voices when two people speak at once. The judge instructed jurors that if the tapes differed from what they were reading, they should use what they had heard instead. The state Supreme Court noted that Smart’s attorneys made no “particularized showing of inaccuracies in the transcripts relating to the recordings or how she may have been harmed” by them.

Deputy Attorney General John Drennan said none of Smart’s claims are supported by facts and that he appears to be using the habeas corpus process as a substitute for an appeal. He compared the discrepancies with the transcripts to someone seeing the text of a transcribed voice message and then hearing the actual message.

“Maybe there’s a cognitive bias going on, but that doesn’t mean I can’t, when I listen, say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure that’s right,'” he said. “I know I should check it out. I know I should be skeptical.”

Smart’s team has not proven other claims, such as ineffective assistance of counsel and that the case was argued in New York, rather than New Hampshire, the state’s attorneys said.

Smart’s legal options are limited. He has unsuccessfully requested several times a sentence reduction hearing before an elected state board in New Hampshire that approves contracts and appoints state courts and agencies. He appealed a rejection to the state Supreme Court, which dismissed his petition in 2023.

His latest petition came after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte rejected his request last year to bring the matter back to the council. Ayotte said he reviewed the case and decided it did not deserve a hearing.

In 2024, Smart took full responsibility for her husband’s death. He said in a video that he spent years deflecting blame “almost as if it were a defense mechanism.”

Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases in the United States involving a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him that she needed her husband killed because she feared she would lose everything if they divorced and that she threatened to break up with him if she did not kill her husband. Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors and all have since been released.

Flynn and Patrick Randall, 17, entered the Smarts condominium in Derry and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the lobby. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn fired a hollow-point bullet into his head. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. They were granted parole in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison sentences and were released.

The case inspired Joyce Maynard’s 1992 book “To Die For” and the 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.