Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar takes what could have been a true crime story and conducts his own inquiry about human suggestibility. You may not be convinced that Pamela Smart is innocent, but you’re likely to conclude that she did not receive a fair trial.

A scene from “Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart.”

Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, directed Jeremiah Zagar, USA/UK. (World premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 2014)

By David D’Arcy

Who remembers Pamela Smart? In 1993, the pert teacher in a New Hampshire high school was convicted of organizing the murder of her husband by four teenagers, one of whom was her lover.

The trial was televised, the first such spectacle back then, and two feature films came out of the story. One of those movies, To Die For (1995), starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Gus van Zandt, became a defining tale of vanity and cold calculated small town ambition, seeming all the more credible because it was released so soon after the trial.

Pamela Smart, convicted and sentenced to life behind bars, has been overtaken by crazier courtroom spectacles since she entered prison twenty years ago. Think of OJ Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt and Phil Spector. Then add a few more names. The reality show trial gave a new profitable TV genre its early credibility. But, for all its entertainment value, was her trial reality?

Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, which premiered at Sundance, is a documentary with the right title. A pretty young wife who transformed from mourner to murder suspect overnight (we’ve seen that before), she became a plotter, an adulteress, and eventually a feisty combatant for her own innocence before the inevitable guilty verdict came in. People traveled and took hotel rooms to be at the trial. The Boston Herald conducted a reader’s poll on her guilt or innocence. The live proceedings got great TV ratings. No wonder the guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. Who would want to disappoint loyal viewers?

Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar takes what could have been a true crime story and conducts his own inquiry about human suggestibility. You may not be convinced that Pamela Smart is innocent, but you’re likely to conclude that she did not receive a fair trial.

At issue is memory, and not simply the retention of information. Here memory isn’t far from wish fulfillment. Zagar shows in interviews that key witnesses gave contradictory versions of events (almost all of which implicated Smart) and that the smoking gun (not the murder weapon, but a tape of Smart speaking, obtained through a hidden microphone) was too unclear to be admitted in most courtrooms. Still, a local judge allowed the garbled recording to be entered as evidence. The same judge refused to have the proceedings moved to another jurisdiction outside the Boston TV market, where he would not have heard the case (and would have missed his chance to be on television). This judge noted that, in an eventual film about the trial, he should be played by Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry on the bench.

The fuzzy archival TV footage from 1993 reminds us how new and raw the immersion in 24-hour television was. Yet the laws were in place to provide that an audio tape submitted as evidence be comprehensible and that a jury saturated with news information be sequestered.

Cost was a factor. It would have been expensive to put a jury in a hotel, and Smart, struggling to pay her legal bills, lacked the funds to challenge the fuzzy audio tape with testimony from an expert. Her own defense team was also inadequate.

Yet testimony from experts reveals the trial to have been as fair as a witch-burning. The parents of Smart’s late husband were permitted to testify that they wept after visiting the young man’s grave. The principal wire-wearing witness against Smart received $100,000 for her story from film producers. Imagine what she would get today.

Presenting the trial as all-day entertainment may have sealed Smart’s fate. In a courtroom drama, as in a movie, casting is everything. Smart was there, most of the media assumed, because this was who she was. Trying to dislodge that perception is like asking someone who is presumed guilty to prove her innocence. It’s in the constitution, but it’s not in the script.

Take the line that a detective practiced again and again, which he says he announced to Smart herself: ”I’ve got good news and bad news – we found your husband’s murderer, and you’re under arrest.”

No one wanted this defendant to play against type.

As I noted, the laws to ensure a fair trial for Smart were in place. The contours of what the public (and prosecutors and reporters) expected were a stronger force.

As Smart sits for the rest of her life in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women – in New York, because no prison in New Hampshire was severe enough for her, the trial judge stressed; and he was right, since she’s been a punching bag there for guards and other inmates — Zagar’s film reminds us that documentary story-telling isn’t immune from formulas that predestine a character or a situation to a conclusion. You often hear praise for a doc that “unfolds like the best of fiction,” where the rise and fall of a character meet the formula satisfactions of a novel. Often enough, that’s lazy writing from film critics, but it also reflects audience demands for neatness rather than for the messier reality of truth.

Truth, as we often see, tends to be improbable and untidy, not fitting the fictional formulas that drive commercial entertainment. If that weren’t the case, documentaries would not be worth watching. In Captivated, we move toward that truth, twenty years later – a long time to wait in prison.

In heading toward the truth, let’s not leave Smart’s own testimony un-scrutinized – she claims that four high school kids planned and executed the killing of her husband.

Smart loves attention, it seems, and she wants to get out of prison. She may well be guilty. Yet she was also entitled to a fair trial, and the court was too caught up with preparing its own close-up to give her one.

David D’Arcy, who lives in New York, is a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He reviews films for Screen International. His film blog, Outtakes, is at artinfo.com. He writes about art for many publications, including The Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary, Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.