They first tried it in 2000, their efforts crashing against a promised veto by Gov. Jeanne Shaheen.
They went for it again in 2009, when the Senate tabled it 13-11; in 2016 when the Senate deadlocked 12-12; and in 2018 when it fell short of a veto override in the upper chamber by two votes.
But this was the year that advocates finally did it. Over the objections of Gov. Chris Sununu, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty on May 30, after a charged debate on the Senate floor and a multi-decade campaign.
“Today, I will vote to override the veto of our governor,” said Sen. Harold French, a Franklin Republican. “Because this vote is about our state and about what kind of state we are all going to be a part of.”
It was by some measures an inevitable outcome: The 2018 elections swept in 16 senators of both parties who put their opposition to the penalty on the record as early as December.
But for one advocate for repeal, the vote stuck a particular note of closure.
Rep. Renny Cushing, the Hampton Democrat at the helm of 20 years of repeal efforts, had taken to the House lectern year after year with a heartrending story: his own.
Thirty years ago, Cushing’s father had been the fatal victim of a horrific home invasion, killed by two shotgun blasts at his own front door. But Cushing’s experience informed his views against the death penalty, not in favor, he said.
On the morning of May 30, the seven-term lawmaker watched from the rafters. When it was done, he embraced a hug train of supporters and survivors.
New Hampshire’s relationship to its death penalty was always a tricky one. The punishment was never implemented in the modern era; the last noose was put to use in 1939. The state doesn’t even have the facilities, drugs or procedures to carry out an execution, and has resisted spending the money to do so.
But the 2006 slaying of Manchester police officer Michael Briggs reinvigorated debate. Michael Addison, convicted for killing the officer in the first degree, currently is the only person on New Hampshire’s death row, though his appeals are expected to take years.
Death penalty supporters have cited Addison as reason number one. And they’ve said that New Hampshire’s policy – even if seldom used – is the best way to protect other officers through deterrence and provide justice to survivors.
To bolster those arguments, opponents lined up police officers, former state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, and Briggs’s mother to testify.
Death penalty opponents, meanwhile, pointed to the high costs associated with the appeals process following death row cases and appealed to moral considerations of false convictions and the purpose of justice.
In the aftermath of the veto override, repeal advocates have celebrated. Yet even with the penalty now off the books, the fate of Michael Addison is still not answered.
Lawmakers designed New Hampshire’s repeal bill to not apply retroactively, meaning Addison’s execution could theoretically move forward if he exhausts his appeals. But supporters of the death penalty have often looked to other states that have repealed their penalties as cautionary tales.
Connecticut lawmakers, for instance, explicitly aimed their repeal bill at future murder convictions, mindful of two men on death row in a gruesome home invasion that killed a mother and two daughters. But the state’s Supreme Court ruled otherwise, invalidating the penalty and commuting the sentence to life without parole.
It could be years until New Hampshire’s Supreme Court gets to the point in the appeals process where it has to decide that for Addison. And speaking earlier this year, Associate Attorney General Jeffrey Strelzin said the state has not yet carved out a strategy on that front.
“We’re not contending anything at this point,” he said.
But for those behind the long campaign to end the penalty, this year’s vote was bigger than any one case anyway.
“It’s almost hard to believe,” said Bess Klassen-Landis a spectator whose mother was killed in Indiana and who opposes the death penalty. “Because it’s been such a long haul.”
Source: concordmonitor.com, Ethan DeWitt, December 26, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
