New Hampshire Becomes 21st State to Abolish the Death Penalty
State Senate overrides GOP Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto in a 16-8 vote.
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Legislators in New Hampshire voted Thursday to do away with the death penalty, joining 20 other states that have made capital punishment a thing of the past. In a 16-8 vote, the state’s Senate overrode Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto of a measure to abolish the practice, which state Sen. Melanie Levesque called “archaic, costly, discriminatory and violent.”
The death penalty repeal bill passed New Hampshire’s House and Senate last year, but lawmakers couldn’t muster enough votes to override Sununu’s veto.
According to Mother Jones, “New Hampshire is the latest to join the growing trend of states abolishing or putting a moratorium on the death penalty. Last year, Washington’s supreme court ruled the practice unconstitutional, and in March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium, providing a reprieve for the 737 inmates on California’s death row.”
New Hampshire’s death penalty—unlike California’s—was largely in name only. The last person executed in the state was Howard Long, who was hung in 1939 for the sexual abuse and murder of children. The state’s death row has only one inmate—Michael Addison, a black man, who has been on death row since 2008 for the 2006 murder of Michael Briggs, a white police officer.
Addison’s case stirred controversy due to some of the circumstances of his sentencing. As Mother Jones notes, in addition to being the only person on death row for the past 11 years in a largely white state, court documents allege that Addison suffered from an intellectual disability.
John Brooks, who was tried around the same time as Addison, was a white multimillionaire who hired a hit man to kill his victim. Brooks received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
New Hampshire state Sen. Martha Hennessey, a Democrat, said, “I am grateful to the many survivors of murder victims who bravely shared their stories with the Legislature this session, many of whom told us that the death penalty only prolongs the pain and trauma of their loss.”
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