State v. Smart

Decision Date26 February 1993
Docket NumberNo. 91-239,91-239
Citation622 A.2d 1197,136 N.H. 639
PartiesThe STATE of New Hampshire v. Pamela SMART.
CourtNew Hampshire Supreme Court

John P. Arnold, Atty. Gen. (Paul A. Maggiotto, Asst. Atty. Gen., on brief and orally), for State.

Johnson, Mee & May, Boston, MA (J. Albert Johnson on brief and orally), for defendant.

BATCHELDER, Justice.

The defendant, Pamela Smart, upon entering her Derry home on the night of May 1, 1990, observed the body of her husband, apparently the victim of a homicide. The police arrived on the scene shortly thereafter and immediately commenced a murder investigation, culminating in the defendant's arrest.

After a jury trial in Superior Court (Gray, J.), the defendant was convicted of accomplice to first degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and tampering with a witness. On appeal, she raises the following issues: whether the pretrial publicity surrounding her case deprived her of an impartial jury; whether, in view of the publicity, the trial court failed to adequately safeguard the trial proceedings; whether the defendant should have been permitted post-verdict voir dire of the jury for alleged juror misconduct; whether the trial court erred in its supplemental instruction to the jury; whether the court erred in denying the defendant's motion to suppress tape recordings of her intercepted conversations; whether the court erred in submitting transcripts of the taped conversations to the jury; and whether the court erred in refusing to allow the defendant to recall two witnesses for renewed cross-examination. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

Viewing the evidence presented at trial in the light most favorable to the State, the jury was warranted in finding the facts as set forth in this opinion. In the fall of 1989, the twenty-two-year-old married defendant was the director of media services for the school district that included Winnacunnet High School in Hampton. She met and befriended William Flynn and Cecelia Pierce, two fifteen-year-old high school students from Seabrook, and they and other students worked together after school hours to produce an orange juice commercial for a contest. Eventually, in February or March of 1990, the defendant and Flynn became sexually involved.

Shortly after their affair began, the defendant told Flynn that in order for them to continue their relationship they would have to kill her husband, Gregory, a twenty-four-year-old insurance salesman to whom the defendant had been married less than a year. Eventually the defendant and Flynn together planned that Flynn would commit the murder with the help of his friends, and would stage the killing as if committed in the course of a burglary of the defendant's home. According to the plan devised by the defendant, she would leave open the bulkhead door to the basement of her home to provide entry for Flynn and the others before Gregory returned home. The perpetrators were to park their car in a shopping center behind the residence and change into dark clothes before approaching the apartment. The defendant advised Flynn that he and his accomplices should wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints and should ransack the apartment, taking away whatever they wanted as compensation. Pursuant to the defendant's plan, her husband was to be killed with a gun upon entering his home as if he had surprised burglars.

Flynn discussed the plan with his friends Pete Randall and Vance Lattime, Jr., also teenagers from Seabrook. With the aid of another boy, Raymond Fowler, Flynn set out from Hampton to commit the murder one night in April, using the defendant's car. When the two arrived at the defendant's apartment complex, however, they saw her husband's truck and abandoned the plan. After this unsuccessful attempt, Flynn recruited Randall and Lattime to help execute the plan. He told them that the defendant had agreed to pay them five hundred dollars each for committing the murder. Lattime provided his father's .38 caliber revolver and his grandmother's car to transport the boys from Seabrook to the defendant's Derry apartment.

After school ended on May 1, 1990, the defendant drove Flynn, Randall and Lattime to pick up Lattime's grandmother's car in Massachusetts. The defendant discussed with them the various details of the murder plan, seeking advice on how to react when she returned home and discovered her husband murdered. Lattime and Randall returned to Seabrook in Lattime's grandmother's car. The defendant drove Flynn back to Seabrook to meet them and then went to Winnacunnet High School to attend a meeting scheduled for that evening.

Flynn, Randall and Lattime picked up Fowler and drove to the defendant's residence. While Lattime and Fowler waited with the car at the shopping center, Flynn and Randall entered the defendant's apartment through the unlocked bulkhead into the basement. After ransacking both the upstairs and downstairs of the apartment, they waited for Gregory to return home, with Flynn carrying the gun and Randall holding a knife he had taken from the kitchen. When Gregory came home, the boys forced him to his knees. While Randall with one hand held Gregory's head down and with the other hand held a knife in front of his face, Flynn shot him once in the head. Taking a pillowcase they had filled with jewelry, the boys fled to meet Fowler and Lattime, and the four drove back to Seabrook. The next day, Lattime replaced the gun among the rest of his father's collection.

On June 10, Ralph Welch, a friend of Lattime, told Lattime's parents that Randall and Lattime had admitted to him their participation in the murder. Lattime's parents took the gun to the Seabrook Police Department, accompanied by Welch, and subsequent ballistics tests confirmed that the gun had been used in the murder.

Worried because of Welch's intentions to go to the police, Randall and Lattime went to see Flynn and the defendant at the latter's new condominium in Hampton. After discussing the matter, the defendant drove them to Seabrook in an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the gun. The next night, June 11, Lattime, Randall and Flynn were arrested.

Virtually daily before May 1, the defendant spoke with Cecelia Pierce, her student intern, about the plan to have Flynn murder her husband. The night before the boys were arrested, the defendant told Pierce of Welch's intention to report the boys to the police, and said that if Lattime and Randall were smart they would blame Welch and Fowler for the murder.

Pierce was questioned several times about the murder by the Derry police and denied any knowledge of it. On June 14, after hearing rumors of the impending arrest of an unidentified girl alleged to be involved, Pierce again met with the Derry police and told them of the defendant's involvement in the murder. She agreed to a phone tap of a conversation with the defendant and to wearing a recording device, or body wire, to record face-to-face conversations with the defendant. On July 12 and 13, with Pierce surreptitiously recording their conversation, the defendant warned Pierce that if Pierce told the truth to the police, Pierce would be an accessory to murder, and urged her to continue to lie. The defendant acknowledged that the boys had carried out the murder to look like a burglary as she had planned, and stated that "nothing was going wrong" until the boys told Welch about it. She stated that, if arrested, she would admit to the affair with Flynn but deny any involvement in the murder plot. She expressed concern that Lattime, who merely waited in the car during the murder, would eventually confess and implicate the others. Nevertheless, the defendant told Pierce she was confident that, as between a sixteen-year-old "in the slammer facing the rest of his life" and herself, "with a professional reputation and a course that I teach," her denial would be believed. The defendant reminded Pierce that, by telling the truth, Pierce would be sending the defendant to prison for the rest of her life.

On August 1, 1990, the defendant was arrested in connection with the murder of her husband. In January 1991, Flynn, Randall and Lattime agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges and subsequently testified for the State at the defendant's trial. Another witness, Cindy Butt, a co-worker of Pierce, testified that a month prior to the murder, Pierce told her that she had a "friend named Pam who wanted to find somebody to kill her husband." George Moses, a high school student, testified that he knew the defendant at Winnacunnet High School and met her again while visiting his mother in prison. According to Moses, the defendant asked him to lie for her by claiming that he had overheard Pierce admit to lying to the police about the defendant's involvement.

The jury found the defendant guilty of all charges.

I. Pretrial Publicity

The defendant's arrest and the events leading up to her trial engendered extraordinarily heavy and widespread media coverage. Numerous articles appeared in the newspapers of the southern tier of New Hampshire, along with coverage in Lawrence and Boston, Massachusetts. By the time of the defendant's trial in March 1991, national media outlets, such as Time magazine, contained reports of the case. The defendant argues that this publicity was so pervasive and prejudicial that we must presume that it was impossible to select an impartial jury in Rockingham County in February 1991. She therefore contends that the trial court erred in not granting her motion for a change of venue and in not sua sponte ordering a continuance. Although the defendant bases her claim on both the State and Federal Constitutions, she relies primarily on federal law, and does not argue for a higher standard under the New Hampshire Constitution. Because we believe the principles are the same in any event, we address her argument under both constitutions, by reference to federal...

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1 books & journal articles
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    • United States
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