Pamela Smart, whose plot to seduce a high-school boy into murdering her husband made her the star of one of the most sensational trials in the state's history, has asked for a pardon.

Smart, 37, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her role in the 1990 murder of Gregory Smart, filed a pardon application with the attorney general's office last week. Greg Adamski, Smart's lead attorney, said yesterday that Smart is asking for clemency because her trial was irreparably tainted by media coverage and that her sentence was disproportionately harsh.

In addition, Adamski said, Smart has become an exemplary prisoner. She has earned master's degrees in social work and education and taught many women how to read and write. She has formed reading groups and established libraries in the Westchester County, N.Y., prison where she is incarcerated.

"She's gotten in there and just really adapted and done great things," said Adamski, who works out of a Chicago-based law firm. "She wants very much to help people."

Smart was handed a life sentence at age 23, after a trial that spawned an international media frenzy, a televised real-life courtroom drama and several books and movies. A jury convicted Smart in 1991 of conspiring with a 15-year-old high school student, with whom she was having an affair, to kill her husband.

Gregory Smart was shot execution-style in the living room of the apartment the couple shared in Derry, the victim of what the police initially believed to be a botched robbery. But soon the police traced the crime to four teenagers who attended Winnacunnet High School in Hampton. At the time, Smart worked as an audiovisual aide for the school district. Eventually, all four students testified against Smart, with gunman William Flynn alleging that Smart convinced him to shoot her husband so they could be together.

Throughout the trial, which riveted television viewers in the state and across the country, Smart maintained that she was guilty only of adultery. She has appealed her conviction three times; the last was denied in 2002.

Like her petition for a pardon, those appeals argued that excessive media coverage denied her the right to a fair trial. Adamski, who compared it to the recent trial of Scott Peterson, said Smart was the victim of an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

"What happens in these kinds of cases is that the public and the jury come to hate this person," he said.

Adamski said the media is also to blame for Smart's sentence. The teenage accomplices were given reduced sentences in exchange for testifying against her, and the jury came down hardest on Smart, who was never placed at the scene of the crime itself.

Smart maintains her innocence in the petition, but Adamski said that is essentially irrelevant at this point.

"In the eyes of the government, her guilt has been established," he said. "That's why we're hoping the governor will look at what she's done since then, despite that guilty conviction. She's doing singular things, she's doing things no one else is doing. And I think if we can bring that across, sooner or later the people of New Hampshire may give her a break."

It's rare for pardons to be issued in the state. Since 1996, governors and the Executive Council have granted them twice, most recently to a National Guardsman who had assaulted his teenage son years before and wanted the pardon so he could serve in Iraq. In that case, the man's son and wife supported the pardon. In 1996, the council pardoned June Briand, a woman who served nine years for second-degree murder for killing her abusive husband.

Smart's petition probably won't come before Gov. John Lynch and the Executive Council for at least a month, said Audrey Blodgett, a paralegal who handles pardons for the attorney general's office. The office is now seeking opinions from the judge who oversaw the trial, the attorneys who prosecuted the case, the victim's family and the superintendent of the prison where Smart is incarcerated. After they have given their opinions regarding the case to the attorney general's office, the petition for the pardon will be sent to the governor and to the Executive Council, which will decide whether to hold a hearing on it.

Paul Maggiotto, a Concord lawyer who prosecuted the case for the attorney general's office, learned yesterday that Smart seeks a pardon. He hadn't yet read the statements she had filed but said Smart doesn't strike him as a prime candidate for a pardon.

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