CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — New Hampshire — which last executed an inmate more than 70 years ago, by hanging — would likely carry out an execution in a prison gymnasium rather than construct a costly death chamber for its lone death row prisoner, Corrections Commissioner William Wren said Wednesday.
Addressing a symposium on the death penalty at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, Wren said he and his staff are ‘‘dusting off’’ execution protocols from the 1930s but the $1.8 million needed to build a lethal injection chamber isn’t in the cards in a state where inmates are so rarely condemned to death.
The symposium offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the case of Michael Addison, sentenced to death in 2008 for gunning down Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs following a violent crime spree. If the state’s highest court upholds his conviction and death sentence, Addison could be the first convict executed in New Hampshire since 1939.
Wren said Addison doesn’t really live on ‘‘death row’’ because the state no longer has one. He is housed in the state prison’s maximum security unit, living alongside other convicts.
The last person executed in New Hampshire was Howard Long, an Alton shopkeeper who molested and beat a 10-year-old boy to death. He was hanged — still a viable form of execution in New Hampshire if lethal injection is not possible.
Panelists made it clear Addison’s case threw a curve at a state criminal justice system that had no modern-day experience with capital litigation.
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Source: Boston.com, Feb. 13, 2013