Pamela Smart: Husband's Death Something 'I Have To Carry For The Rest Of My Life'
BOSTON (CBS) – Speaking from a maximum security prison in New York where she has been held for the last 23 years, Pamela Smart is adamant about her guilt – and also her innocence.
"More than half my life I have been in prison. Literally I've been in prison more than I've been in the free world what more do people want?," Smart said in an exclusive jailhouse interview with WBZ-TV's Paula Ebben.
Twenty five years after the 1990 shooting death of Smart's husband Gregg in their New Hampshire condo, her relationship with then 16-year-old student Billy Flynn is frozen in time with books, movies, and a recent HBO documentary.
Read: Smart Remorseful Over Husband's Death
"I do feel a lot of responsibility in the fact that my husband was killed and it was because of a relationship that I had. So that's something that I have to carry for the rest of my life," Smart said.
Flynn and accomplice Patrick Randall will be the last of four teen boys involved in the murder paroled Thursday from prison
"People can feel sorry for them as much as they want. They can cry as much as they want. But nonetheless they went in to my condo, they put my husband on his knees and they killed him while he begged for his life. And I wasn't there for that," said an emotional Smart.
Smart hopes the public will remember her sensationalized trial as unfair.
"It was just me, this average person up against the state and all its resources, and it was just unbalanced," Smart said.
Smart calls her sentence, life without the chance for parole, disproportionate to the men who committed the murder.
And she also knows any chance of a sentence reduction is now an uphill battle.
"People watch you and think you look stoic. They want you to say 'I'm sorry,' they want you to say 'I did it.' And you're saying that's a moment that is never going to come?," Ebben asked Smart during the extensive interview.
"I mean, unless I lied," Smart replied.
For more of Paula Ebben's exclusive interview with Pamela Smart, tune in to WBZ-TV at 11 p.m.