A petition seeking Pamela Smart’s pardon was circulated during a weekend campaign on Twitter late last month with an attached message from Smart reading, “As the years and decades continue to pass me by, it would be easy to just give up hope, but as long as I have a breath in my body, I will continue to fight this injustice.”

For over a quarter of a century, Pamela Smart has tried to make herself the victim, blaming her teenage lover, his friends, the police, the courts, and the media for her conviction. It was the “trial of the century” just years before O.J. Simpson tried to squeeze his big hands into those infamous blood-soaked gloves. Reporters came from as far away as Europe and lined up early to get a seat at the Rockingham County Superior Courthouse, which was then located in Exeter. It seemed like everyone wanted to hear the horrifying tale of the high school teacher who used sex to convince her student lover William Flynn and three of his teenage friends into murdering her husband, Gregg Smart.

Pamela Smart was working as a media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, New Hampshire and was only 22 years old when she met and seduced 15 year old student, Billy Flynn. The case and trial grabbed national headlines and was the basis for the book “To Die For,” which was later turned into a movie starring Nicole Kidman as Smart.

Smart was convicted for orchestrating/planning Gregg’s murder by Flynn and three of his friends at the Smarts’ rented condo in Derry, NH while she was 40 miles away at a school board meeting in Hampton. The boys — as they are still often described — have all been released from prison. They cut deals to reduce their time in prison by testifying against Smart. They have moved on with their lives, but no one can forget Billy Flynn’s tearful testimony, confessing how Smart told him he had to kill Gregg if he wanted to be with her. She is serving a life sentence without the chance for parole for being an accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and witness tampering.

In 2005, Governor John Lynch said that he believed that Smart’s crimes were brutal and that she was fairly convicted by a jury of New Hampshire citizens and was fairly sentenced for her crimes. The Executive Council followed Lynch’s lead by voting unanimously to deny Smart a pardon hearing, which would have released her from prison with the time she had already served. In January 2013, former Gov. Maggie Hassan told the Portsmouth Herald, through spokesman Marc Goldberg, “Gov. Hassan feels that a pardon should only be considered in instances where there has been a clear miscarriage of justice.” Since then, she has petitioned for a pardon from the newest Governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. That hearing has not yet been confirmed or denied.

“Why is the 25 years that I’ve spent in prison not enough?” she said. “If the people of New Hampshire wanted me to suffer, they’ve been successful at that.” Smart says that the fact that Billy Flynn, the one who pulled the actual trigger, being recently released from prison while she remains in prison till the day she dies, demonstrates how her sentence was and still is ‘unfair’ in her opinion. Portsmouth, NH local and mother of a New Hampshire high school student herself strongly disagrees with that: “Of course she believes that she’s the victim in this situation, she’s clearly guilty for committing those terrible crimes. Not only did she waste her own life, she wasted her husband’s, and those three young boys who couldn’t have foreseen what they were about to do when they met her.”

Smart knows her only hope for freedom one day would come from a sentence reduction approved by the governor and Executive Council.