In this episode of The In Between, Mel sits down with Pamela Smart’s attorney and her good friend— Matthew Zernhelt, on what feels like a turning point day in Pam’s case.
Matt has spent years doing the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into soundbites: complex post-conviction litigation, constitutional violations, and the long, grinding fight to get a court to actually look at what went wrong. And this week, he and his team filed a new habeas petition — a last-resort legal mechanism that lets you challenge a conviction after the appeals are over, but only on specific, fundamental constitutional grounds.
We break down what a habeas petition is (in plain English), why Pam’s case is so unusual, and why this filing is happening in two places at once: New Hampshire, where she was convicted, and New York, where she’s been incarcerated for decades under an interstate compact that creates a jurisdictional mess no one seems to have a clear playbook for.
Then we walk through the five core arguments in the petition — including:
A groundbreaking scientific study on confirmation bias and “expectation-induced” hearing, showing how state-created transcripts shaped what jurors believed they heard on barely-audible wiretaps.
A media-tainted verdict, including evidence that a juror relied on a newspaper story during trial — information that was never presented in court.
An unauthorized concession of guilt by trial counsel in closing argument, and why that matters legally (not just emotionally).
Faulty jury instructions, including what the jury was not properly told about accomplice liability, premeditation, and what evidence they were allowed to consider.
A sentencing problem that still stops me cold: the claim that Pam was given life without parole as if it were mandatory — when the law didn’t actually mandate it for the charge she was convicted of.
This is a conversation about law, yes — but it’s also about how a person gets “convicted by headline,” how institutions double down, and what it takes to reopen a case the public thinks it already knows.
You’ll hear what happens next, what an evidentiary hearing would look like, and what a “win” actually means here — a new trial, a new sentencing hearing, or the first real shot in decades at getting Pamela Smart back to New Hampshire… and back to her life.
(The petition is public and will be made available to listeners. The underlying study has not yet been formally published, but it’s coming.)
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