New Hampshire abolished its death penalty in 2019, leaving 45-year-old Michael Addison the only person on death row. Addison was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing Manchester police officer Michael Briggs. Now, Addison’s lawyers are asking the state Supreme Court to commute Addison’s death sentence, arguing that it’s disproportionate because no one convicted of a similar crime will be sentenced to death.
According to the NH Journal, https://tinyurl.com/yyeypk37, in their petition to the state high court, Addison’s lawyers maintain that, “With its legislative repeal of the death penalty on May 23, 2019, New Hampshire concluded that the death penalty is an excessive and disproportionate punishment for any crime or defendant,” a “profound shift in community values against the death penalty,” which calls for the court to “conduct a renewed comparative proportionality review.”
The NH Journal points out, however, that the 2019 law abolishing the death penalty “included a carve-out to keep the death penalty in place for anyone already awaiting execution,” which applied only to Addison.
New Hampshire’s abolition of the death penalty was due in large part to the New Hampshire House Democratic leader, Robert “Renny” Cushing, who spent decades promoting legislation to abolish it, finally succeeding in 2019, making New Hampshire the 21st state in the U.S. to abolish the death penalty.
Cushing, who died in March 2022, was a tireless advocate for crime victims and a staunch opponent of capital punishment. The founder and Executive Director of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, his opposition to the death penalty was unshakeable, surprising to some because his father was murdered in 1988. But for Cushing, his father’s killing was all the more reason to oppose the death penalty.
“If we let those who kill turn us into murderers, evil triumphs, and we are all worse off,” he would explain.