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| Gallows, Department of Corrections, Smyrna, Delaware, 1991. Delaware tore down its gallows in 2003. |
Delaware Repeal Project rallies support to end capital punishment
John Breckinridge, a retired police officer from Manchester, N.H., hasn't always been against the death penalty.
In the months and years after he witnessed his partner slain in the line of duty, Breckinridge was as staunch a supporter of the death penalty as there could be.
"I was pretty hardcore on board," he said. "I wanted this guy dead."
Breckinridge was in Delaware as part of Death Penalty Awareness Days put on by the Delaware Repeal Project, a group attempting to repeal the death penalty in Delaware.
Breckinridge, along with Chief James Abbott of the West Orange Police Department in New Jersey and former investigator with the New York State Police Terrence Dwyer, spoke at a number of town hall meetings in Kent and New Castle counties Nov. 18-20.
Abraham J. Bonowitz, project consultant, said the former police officers were brought to Delaware to show the public police officers do support the repeal of the death penalty.
Senate Bill 19, repealing capital punishment in Delaware, made it through the Senate in March 2013 by an 11 to 10 vote, but it was tabled in the House Judiciary Committee and never saw the House floor for discussion.
Bonowitz said a new bill will have to be introduced; he hoped the recent meetings would rally support before the beginning of a new legislative session.
During a visit to the Cape Gazette offices Nov. 20, Breckinridge described his partner's death and how it affected his life.
He and partner Michael Briggs were on patrol when a call came through about a domestic dispute. Breckinridge said the dispute involved 2 guys who had recently risen to the top of the Manchester police department's list of bad guys, so they knew there was a potential for trouble.
Fortunately, nothing happened. The men handled the situation, and went on their way - 15 minutes from finishing their shift at 3 a.m.
Breckinridge said he wanted to go back to the department, finish the paperwork associated with the dispute, and go home. Briggs wanted to check something else out, so Breckinridge went with him because that's what good partners do.
The officers came across the 2 men from the domestic dispute. As they approached, one pulled a gun out of the front pocket of a sweatshirt and shot Briggs in the head.
Breckinridge doesn't remember much of the immediate aftermath. He knows he fired off 4 shots, but they all missed. He knows he wishes he hadn't missed.
"I beat myself up a lot about that," he said.
Breckinridge said Briggs was the type of guy who could have dated his sister and he would have been OK with it.
The killer was found in Boston, convicted for the murder in 2008 and put on death row in New Hampshire. The man is the only person on New Hampshire's death row.
Breckinridge said there's video out there of him being asked how he felt after the conviction. It has him saying he thought it was the right thing to do.
"I was just so damn angry," he said.
Breckinridge said he began to change his opinion of the death penalty when it nearly ruined his marriage. It was close enough, he said, that when the couple went to a counselor it was to figure out what to do with the kids, not to try and work things out.
He said he was drinking heavily. He was the guy who would stay on a friend's couch until he was kicked out.
His first step in making amends with his family was retiring from his job in 2010. He had been on the force for 22 years. He said retiring helped because the anger began to die down when he was not around the other officers everyday.
Being a police officer is like being a member of a fraternity, said Breckinridge. "There's a lot of pressure to think alike."
Then he started going back to church, which made him begin to question the morality of wanting another human dead.
Breckinridge also began reading research and discovered it's more expensive to use the death penalty than to put someone in prison for life. He said estimates show that annually it costs about $30,000 to house an inmate. He said the state of New Hampshire has spent nearly $5 million on just this case because of all the appeals associated with a capital punishment case. Additionally, the state doesn't have a place to actually carry out an execution. He said it would cost about $1 million to build that facility.
Finally, Breckinridge spoke with people who had been wrongly convicted of a crime, put on death row and then exonerated because advances in science proved they were innocent. One of the guys he spoke with, Kirk Bloodsworth, was in Delaware in February with the Delaware Repeal Project pushing for SB19 to be voted on. Bloodsworth spent nine years in jail, two of them on death row, before a DNA test proved his innocence.
Nearly a decade after his partner's slaying, Breckinridge said, there are still side affects from the incident. He's got a "weird twitch" that didn't exist beforehand. He'll dream about the shooting and wake up in a bad mood, which, he said, his wife calls "waking up bad." Without warning, the shooting will pop into his head.
"There's no real trigger," he said. "It just replays in my head."
Breckinridge said the message he wanted get across during his visit was more about trying to get people to think for themselves. Most people don't think about the death penalty until they're faced with a situation that forces them to, he said.
Source: CapeGazette.com, December 9, 2014