[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., N.C., COLO.

[Rick Halperin]

January 14





NEW HAMPSHIRE:

Death Penalty Opponents in NH See Chance for Repeal in 2019



Is this the year New Hampshire’s death penalty is repealed?

New Hampshire is the only state in New England with the death penalty and one 
of 30 states nationwide. However, since 1985 when New Hampshire decided to 
change its method of administering the death penalty from hanging to lethal 
injection, lawmakers have made numerous unsuccessful attempts to abolish 
capital punishment.

Once nearly every 2-year term for more than 2 decades, the New Hampshire 
General Court has voted on a bill to abolish the death penalty.

Twice the House and Senate approved repealing the death penalty — in 2000 and 
last year in 2018 — but both times were successfully vetoed, by then-Gov. 
Jeanne Shaheen in 2000 and last year Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the bill and 
lawmakers failed to override.

But this year repeal advocates, who range from clergy to murder victims’ 
families to former law enforcement personnel, believe there may be the votes to 
override a veto.

Democrats have control of both the House and Senate but not by veto-proof 
margin.

Long-time advocate Arnie Alpert, co-director of the Quaker-based American 
Friends Service Committee in New Hampshire, insists the issue is not partisan 
and has garnered much support from all sides of the aisle: Democrats, 
Republicans, Libertarians and Independents.

The sponsors of this year’s bill bear that out.

The prime sponsor – as he has been numerous times – Rep. Renny Cushing, 
D-Hampton, whose father was gunned down by an off-duty Hampton police officer, 
and other long-time opponents such as Sen. Martha Fuller Clark, D-Portsmouth, 
and Mary Jane Wallner, D-Concord, to new converts like Laura Pantelakos, 
D-Portsmouth, and David Welch, R-Kingston, along with conservatives such as 
Sens. John Reagan, R-Deerfield, Bob Giuda, R-Warren, and Rep. Carol Maguire, 
R-Epsom. Other sponsors are John O’Connor, R-Derry, Paul Berch, D-Westmoreland, 
David Danielson, R-Bedford, and Linda Harriott-Gathright, D-Nashua.

No public hearing date has been set for House Bill 455, which replaces the 
death penalty with life imprisonment without parole as the penalty for capital 
murder.

The Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee will have to decide what 
recommendation to make on the bill by March 14 and the House will have to take 
action by March 28. Cushing is the chair of the committee.

The House has approved repealing the death penalty a number of times, but the 
Senate was often the block, including several years when a tie vote doomed the 
bill.

In the repeal effort’s early stages, any attempt was a difficult climb because 
law enforcement would turn out en masse to oppose the bill.

Every state attorney general still living would testify against the bill as 
would police chiefs from Pittsburg to Seabrook to Hinsdale.

Representatives Hall would be packed with police officers in uniform all 
opposed to the bill and calling the death penalty the greatest deterrent when 
their lives are on the line.

In New Hampshire, the death penalty is only applied when someone is convicted 
of capital murder, which originally meant killing someone in law enforcement — 
police officer, sheriff, probation or parole officer, or a corrections officers 
while on duty or in retaliation for doing their jobs.

The list grew

Judges and those in similar positions like marital masters, as well as 
prosecutors were added to the list.

Capital murder also includes murder committed during a kidnapping, rape, 
robbery or a drug offense. Someone can be tried for capital murder for a 
contract killing, and if a person in prison for life without parole commits 
murder.

In recent years, New Hampshire has done more to expand the capital murder 
statute instead of repealing it.

But six or seven years ago the tide for repeal began to change with several 
former attorney generals, Philip McLaughlin and Gregory Smith, some former or 
current police chiefs, and state and local prosecutors began to publicly 
support repealing the death penalty.

And in 2014, the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, for the 
1st time voted in favor — by a large margin — to recommend repeal. Those 
backing repeal included some long-time supporters who said they had changed 
their positions after listening to the stories.

New Hampshire may have had the death penalty since 1734, but has not put anyone 
to death since 1939, when Howard Long, a store owner from Alton, was hanged for 
molesting and fatally beating a 10-year-old boy from Laconia.

2 women in Portsmouth who were believed to have killed their “bastard” infants 
were convicted of concealing the deaths, the first people to be put to death in 
1739.

>From the first deaths through 1939, New Hampshire administered the death 
penalty to 24 people.

For many years, New Hampshire had no one on death row. In 1949, Ralph Jennings 
was sentenced to death for killing a woman, but he hanged himself in his jail 
cell.

Since then no one had been on death row until Michael Addison was given the 
death sentence in 2008 for killing Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs 2 
years earlier. His case is currently on appeal.

Addison’s case both helped and hurt the push to repeal the death penalty. Some 
lawmakers wanted to include a provision that if the death penalty were 
repealed, it would not change his status.

Whether that was possible or not was the subject of much debate, but most legal 
scholars believed if the state repealed the death sentence, his sentence would 
also change to life without parole.

But his sentence also made the repeal effort more urgent. It is hard to make 
the case the death penalty needs to be repealed when no one is on death row and 
the state has no facility to carry out the sentence.

With a person on death row, that argument changes.

While advocates are hopeful, finding a 2/3 majority to override a sure veto 
from Sununu is still a pretty steep climb.

Override requirement

The House requires a 2/3 majority of those present and voting, so if all 400 
members were present, 267 would need to vote for the override.

In the Senate, 16 votes are necessary for an override.

Last year the Senate voted 14-10 to override Sununu’s veto of Senate Bill 593, 
which would have repealed the death penalty, 2 votes short of what was needed. 
The House did not vote on repeal because the Senate voted first and failed. 
Earlier the House passed the bill on a 223-116 vote, which is 5 votes shy of a 
2/3 majority.

This term Democrats control the Senate by a 14-10 majority and the House by a 
223-167 advantage.

While repealing the death penalty is not a partisan issue, it is apparent 
advocates’ optimism is justified.

(source: manchesterlink.com)








NORTH CAROLINA:

Judge OK's seeking death penalty in trooper's fatal shooting



A judge has signed off on a prosecutor's plan to seek the death penalty for a 
young adult accused in a North Carolina trooper's shooting death.

Multiple news outlets report Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser made the 
decision during Friday's court hearing Friday for 18-year-old Chauncey Askew. 
He's charged with 1st-degree murder in the October death of Trooper Kevin 
Conner. District Attorney Jon David announced earlier his plans to seek capital 
punishment.

? Authorities say the shooting occurred along U.S. Highway 701, when a pickup 
truck was stopped for a speeding violation. Conner died at the hospital. Askew 
was arrested later in South Carolina.

David says Raheem Cole Dashanell Davis is now indicted for accessory after the 
fact to 1st-degree murder in Conner's death. Davis' original 1st-degree murder 
charge was dropped.

(source: Associated Press)








COLORADO:

Is state ready to abolish the death penalty?



I know not every Democrat, not even every political progressive, believes that 
the death penalty ought to be abolished. I'd expect that Libertarians and 
independents who do not believe in wasting money or in the state's right to 
kill its citizens would see that execution is a bridge too far, but few choose 
to make any public comment about waste and overreach at all, where the death 
penalty is concerned.

I felt heartened that we abolitionists in Colorado came within one vote of 
death penalty abolition in 2009, but even a decade since, with fewer murders, 
falling crime rates, and reduced execution numbers, I'm not assured that our 
Democratic majority state Senate and House, and Democratic governorship means 
an end to the Colorado death penalty.

Some say abolition is not on anyone's radar, people could care less, and it 
will fall of its own financial wasteful weight. But that is not how progress is 
made in the social justice arena. Bad laws, scandalous prison conditions, over- 
zealous prosecutors, societal appetite for grisly television and movies, 
endless war, the horrible reality of 164 exonerated death row prisoners 
nationwide, some held for almost 30 years and released without any compensation 
for that big mistake, these everyday, pedestrian social mores and routine 
injustices have not and may not wake the public conscience to the fraud and 
brutality that is the expensive, ineffectual Colorado capital punishment 
reality.

Gov. Hickenlooper regularly promised a statewide discussion of the death 
penalty. I hope we are past calling for discussion and ready to call the death 
penalty the uncivilized barbarity that it is. Gov. Polis, are you ready?

Ellen V. Moore, coordinator of Amnesty International USA Colorado State Death 
Penalty Abolition

Nederland

(source: Letter to the Editor, The Daily Camera)