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Overriding a veto by Governor Chris Sununu, the New Hampshire legislature has repealed the state’s death-penalty statute. With a 16-8 supermajority, the May 30, 2019 vote of the New Hampshire Senate equaled the two-thirds required to override a gubernatorial veto. One week earlier, the state House had voted to override with a 247-123 supermajority. The override vote made New Hampshire the 21st state to abolish capital punishment and the ninth to do so in the last 15 years. Half of all U.S. states, including every northeastern state, now either have a moratorium on executions or have abolished capital punishment. The one person on New Hampshire’s death row, Michael Addison, is not affected by the new law, which applies only to future cases.
Rep. Renny Cushing (D–Hampton), whose father and brother-in-law were murdered in separate incidents, sponsored the bill and lauded the legislature’s action. “I think it's important the voices of family members who oppose the death penalty were heard, the voices of law enforcement who recognize that the death penalty doesn’t work in terms of public safety, and the voices of the people in the state that know the death penalty is an abhorrent practice were all heard today by the Legislature,” he said. Sen. Bob Giuda (R–Warren), a former FBI agent, called the death penalty a “ghastly” practice that was at odds with his pro-life principles. Voting to override the veto, Giuda said: “I think we’re better than that. I choose to move our state forward to remove the death penalty.”
During the Senate debate on the override, death penalty supporters echoed Governor Sununu’s arguments that the death penalty was necessary to support police. The state’s single death sentence was imposed for the murder of Manchester police officer Michael Briggs. Democratic Sen. Lou D'Allesandro, who represents Manchester said that influenced his support for the governor’s veto. “Our law enforcement people see this as a deterrent,” he said. "I believe strongly we have to … support them." Sen. Sharon Carson (R–Londonderry) invoked the Addison case as grounds to uphold the veto. “If you think you’re passing this today and Mr. Addison is still going to remain on death row, you are confused,” she said. “Mr. Addison’s sentence will be converted to life in prison.”
Statistics show that the death penalty does not have a measurable effect on the rate at which police officers are killed. Legislators who supported repeal also cited other issues such as costs and discrimination among their reasons for overriding the governor’s veto. Sen, Melanie Levesque (D – Nashua) called the death penalty “archaic, costly, discriminatory, and violent. This is time to end it,” she said. Sen. Harold French (R–Franklin) said, he was voting to override the veto “because this vote is about our state and about what kind of state we are all going to be a part of.”
This was the second consecutive year in which the legislature had voted to abolish the death penalty and Governor Sununu had vetoed the attempted repeal. In 2018, the Senate fell two votes short of overriding the veto. The state also came close to abolishing the death penalty in 2014, when a repeal bill failed on a tie vote in the Senate, and in 2000, when Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed an abolition bill.
For the second time in as many years, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu (pictured, left) has vetoed a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty. Sununu’s action on May 3, 2019 sets the stage for an anticipated attempt later in the legislative session to override the Governor’s veto. A two-thirds vote in each house is required to override.
The New Hampshire legislature also voted to repeal the death penalty during its 2018 legislative session, but fell short of the two-thirds majority necessary to override Gov. Sununu’s veto. The legislature again approved a repeal bill this session, this time with veto-proof majorities in both houses. In February, the New Hampshire House of Representatives conducted a public hearing at which more than 100 witnesses—including representatives of law enforcement, family members of homicide victims, death-row exonerees, and faith leaders—testified. The witnesses voiced overwhelming support for the bill. On March 7, the House voted 279-88 in favor of repeal. After holding an additional public hearing, the State Senate voted 17-6 on April 11 to pass the repeal bill.
As he did in 2018, Governor Sununu made law enforcement the visual focus of his veto message. Flanked by uniformed police officers In a photo opportunity at a community center named for slain Officer Michael Briggs, Sununu called the repeal bill “an injustice not just to Officer Briggs and his family, but to law enforcement and other victims of violent crime across the state.” Sununu said: “I cannot thank those standing behind me enough. They put their lives on the line every single day. Every day they walk out that door and put their lives on the line. They don’t ask a whole lot, but they do ask for our support.”
A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of 31 years of FBI homicide data has shown that the death penalty makes no measurable contribution to public safety or to protecting police officers. DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham summarized the findings in testimony before the New Hampshire House Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety during the February legislative hearings. The FBI murder data, Dunham said, “shows that officers are disproportionately murdered in states that have the death penalty, as compared to states that don’t.” Four of the five safest states for police officers had no death penalty at any time in the last three decades, and seven of the eight safest states for police officers either never had the death penalty or had recently abolished it, he said. Overall, Dunham testified, “[t]he data … strongly suggests that having the death penalty has not made officers safer.”
The repeal bill was introduced by State Rep. Renny Cushing (D – Rockingham; pictured, right), whose father and brother-in-law were murdered in unrelated incidents years apart. Cushing has described the death penalty as a “ritualized killing” that does nothing to compensate for a victim’s family’s loss. State Sen. Ruth Ward (R – Stoddard), whose father was killed when she was 7 years old, also supported the measure. “[My father] never saw us grow up,” she said. “My mother forgave whoever it was, and I will vote in favor of this bill.”
New Hampshire last carried out an execution in 1939. It has imposed one death sentence since reinstating the death penalty in 1991, sentencing Michael Addison to death in 2008 for the murder of Officer Briggs. The bill would not affect Addison’s sentence, but death-penalty proponents argue that the courts would overturn his sentence if the death penalty were to be repealed.
In a vote death-penalty opponents praised as “historic,” a veto-proof supermajority of the New Hampshire legislature gave final approval to a bill that would repeal the state’s death penalty statute. By a vote of 17-6, the senators voted on April 11, 2019 to end capital prosecutions in the Granite State, exceeding the two-thirds majority necessary to override an anticipated veto by Governor Chris Sununu. In March, the state House of Representatives passed the same abolition bill, HB 455, by a veto-proof 279-88 supermajority. For the second consecutive year, the bill received bipartisan support, including sponsorship by seven Democratic and six Republican sponsors across both legislative houses. Twelve Democratic and five Republican senators voted in favor of repeal. An identical bill to repeal the death penalty passed the legislature in 2018, but was vetoed by Gov. Chris Sununu, and an attempt to override the veto fell two votes short in the Senate.
The Governor’s office issued a statement after the vote saying that Sununu “continues to stand with crime victims, members of the law enforcement community, and advocates for justice in opposing a repeal of the death penalty.” Repeal advocates quickly responded to that claim, noting that numerous retired prosecutors, members of law enforcement, and relatives of murder victims had testified in favor of repeal. Rep. Renny Cushing (D – Rockingham), whose father and brother-in-law were murdered in two separate incidents, was one of the leading proponents of the bill. Cushing has described the death penalty as a “ritualized killing” that does nothing to compensate for a victim’s family’s loss. “The governor has positioned himself as saying he’s vetoing the repeal of the death penalty because he cares about law enforcement and victims, but he’s refused to meet with murder victims’ family members who oppose the death penalty,” Cushing said. Sen. Ruth Ward (R – Stoddard), whose father was killed when she was 7 years old, spoke briefly before casting her vote: “He never saw us grow up. My mother forgave whoever it was, and I will vote in favor of this bill,” she said.
During the Senate debate, senators mentioned costs, racial inequities, and wrongful convictions among their reasons for supporting repeal. Senator John Reagan (R – Deerfield), a Republican who voted in favor of repeal, told The New York Times that he doesn’t trust the government with capital punishment. "The more and more experience I had with government, I concluded that the general incompetency of government didn’t make them the right people to decide life and death,” he said. The New Hampshire legislative vote reflects emerging bipartisanship in state legislative efforts to repeal the death penalty. “The vote to end New Hampshire’s death penalty included many conservative Republican lawmakers,” said Hannah Cox, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “They join a growing number of GOP state legislators around the country who feel strongly that capital punishment does not comport with their conservative beliefs, such as limited government, fiscal responsibility, and valuing life.” Republican-backed bills to abolish the death penalty or limit its use have been introduced in a number of states this year, including Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Wyoming.
The New Hampshire repeal bill applies only to future crimes, and does not address the fate of Michael Addison, the only person on New Hampshire’s death row. No one has been executed in New Hampshire since 1939. If the bill becomes law, New Hampshire will be the 21st state to abolish capital punishment and the ninth in the past 15 years.
By an overwhelming 279-88 margin, a veto-proof majority of the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted on March 7, 2019 to repeal the state’s death penalty. Demonstrating strong bipartisan support that garnered the backing of 56 more legislators than an identical repeal bill received in April 2018, the vote ended speculation as to how the reconstituted chamber would respond to repeal. 93 of the 400 representatives in the state house who participated in the vote in 2018 did not seek reelection, and more than one-third of the representatives had never before voted on a death-penalty issue. The bill now advances to the State Senate, where 16 of the 30 senators elected in November 2018 have said they support repeal, also a veto-proof majority. A death penalty repeal bill has been considered by the Granite State’s lawmakers every session over the last two decades and was passed by the state’s House and Senate in April 2018. However, Governor Sununu vetoed that bill in June, and the Senate fell two votes shy of the two-thirds supermajority needed to override the veto.
More than 100 witnesses testified at public hearings conducted by the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee in February, with more than 90 advocating for repeal. Representative Renny Cushing, the committee’s chairman and the prime sponsor of the bill, said, “We had a very powerful, public hearing ... with all the reasons to oppose the death penalty presented in a really clear fashion.” Cushing, whose father and brother-in-law were murdered in two different incidents, has been a death-penalty abolitionist for more than two decades. The death penalty “does nothing to bring back our loved ones,” he said. “All it does is widen the circle of violence.” Republican Representative David Welch, who supported the death penalty in the last 16 legislative sessions, said his wife’s recent death made him rethink capital punishment. “The grief I’ve experienced since then has been horrible and it has not diminished,” he said. “An inmate on death row has loved ones that care for him in spite of what he has done. The victim’s family goes through grief similar to what I went through. When that inmate is put to death, there’s another family going through that grief. Both families are innocent, and they both went through the same thing.” Freshman Democratic Representative Safiya Wazir, whose family fled Afghanistan when she was a child, argued that the United States should not be among the “terrible list of states that use the death penalty” – like Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Discussing the state’s “Live Free or Die” motto, she said, “Let’s put the emphasis on living. New Hampshire is better than this.”
The prospective repeal bill would not affect the only prisoner currently on New Hampshire’s death row, Michael Addison. The state has not executed anyone since 1939.
Bills to repeal and replace the death penalty with non-capital punishments have gained new traction across the United States in 2019 as a result of opposition to the death penalty among ideologically conservative legislators. That movement – buoyed by fiscal and pro-life conservatives, conservative law-reform advocates, and the deepening involvement of the Catholic Church in death-penalty abolition – has led to unprecedented successes in numerous houses of state legislatures and moved repeal efforts closer to fruition in a number of deeply Republican states. In 2019, conservative legislators are leading the call for death-penalty abolition in conservative-leaning states such as Wyoming, Montana, and Kentucky, and playing a critical role in bipartisan efforts to repeal or reform capital punishment in Virginia and New Hampshire.
The surprise strength of a death-penalty repeal bill in Wyoming is emblematic of the growing Republican abolition movement. There, in an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, a bill to replace the death penalty with life without parole garnered significant support from both parties and passed the state house and a senate committee before falling short in the full senate. In Kentucky and Montana, Republican legislators have introduced abolition legislation and are attempting to build coalition support, and in Virginia, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a bill to ban the death penalty for people with severe mental illness. Conservatives have said they oppose capital punishment because of pro-life beliefs, a desire to reduce government spending, and the lack of deterrent effect. In New Hampshire, a bill to abolish the death penalty passed the legislature with bipartisan support, but was vetoed in 2018. The legislature has renewed bipartisan repeal efforts in 2019.
The Wyoming House of Representatives voted (36-21) on February 1 to pass HB 145, a bill to abolish the death penalty. The bill garnered the support of a majority of House Republicans, all the house Democrats who voted, and the chamber’s lone Independent. It then unanimously passed the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee on February 13, before being defeated in the full Senate by a vote of 12-18. In the Senate, nine Republicans and all three Democrats voted in favor of abolition. The bill was introduced by Republican Rep. Jared Olsen of Cheyenne with Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in both houses. Senate co-sponsor Brian Boner (R – Converse) said, “We have an obligation to have a justice system that is blind and based on facts, and not based on what we wished it was or what it used to be.” Olsen said he was concerned about the number of exonerations from death row. “It is way too much authority to vest in our government, and we get it wrong,” he said. Concerns about costs convinced Sen. Bill Landen (R – Casper) to vote for abolition. "I finally decided that I can't go home and feel good about explaining to people all of those myriad of cuts we've made to the state budget and then defend expenditures like this, which have gone on for years and years and years," he said. Wyoming spends an estimated $750,000 per year on legal costs associated with the death penalty, but has not executed anyone since 1992 nor imposed a death sentence since 2004.
Kentucky House Majority Whip Chad McCoy (R – Nelson) said he hopes to get support for his abolition bill from Catholic legislators who have a moral opposition to the death penalty, as well as fiscal conservatives who see it as a costly, ineffective government program. “When you talk about death penalty, a lot of people immediately want to have a criminal justice angle on it or a morality angle. And mine is purely economics,” he said. Kentucky also rarely uses the death penalty. Its last execution was in 2008 and its last death sentence was in 2014. State Representative Mike Hopkins, R-Missoula, the sponsor of Montana’s bill to replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole, told a House committee on February 18 that the state’s death penalty was simply ineffective. The two people sentenced to death in the state have been on death row for thirty years, he said, and “there is no logical measurement that 30 years equals a death sentence. … Regardless of how you feel because of capital punishment, nobody is dying from it.”
Empowered by the results of the November 2018 mid-term elections, legislatures in at least four states are poised to renew efforts to repeal their states’ death-penalty statutes or drastically reduce the circumstances in which capital punishment is available. State legislative and gubernatorial elections in Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Oregon have redefined the local political landscape in 2019 in ways that death-penalty abolitionists say have made those bills more likely to succeed. Colorado and Oregon already have moratoria on the death penalty, but legislators in both states are expected to move forward with bills abolishing or further restricting its use. In New Hampshire, where legislators voted to repeal the death penalty in 2018 but were unable to override a gubernatorial veto, the newly-elected legislature may now have the two-thirds supermajority necessary to override. And in Nevada, where a state court found that corrections officials had engaged in “subterfuge” in attempts to obtain execution drugs, voters elected a governor who has expressed concerns about capital punishment, and legislators say they will propose an abolition bill.
In Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper, who imposed a moratorium on executions in May 2013, was barred by term limits from seeking reelection. Voters elected Democrat Jared Polis (pictured, left), who said during the gubernatorial campaign that he would sign a bill to abolish or phase out the state’s death penalty, and Democrats gained control of both houses of the state legislature. Fort Collins State Rep. Jeni Arndt, who plans to sponsor the repeal bill, said she is seeking bipartisan support for the measure, noting that “If [prosecutors] can’t get the death penalty for the Aurora theater shooter, then this is a waste of taxpayer time and money.” Outgoing senate minority leader Lucia Guzman, a past sponsor of repeal legislation, said “I have worked on this issue for several years but wasn’t able to get it passed. But I think this year is going to be the year.”
Mid-term changes to the composition of the New Hampshire legislature have increased the likelihood that the Granite State will repeal its death penalty in 2019, despite another promised veto by Gov. Chris Sununu. State Rep. Renny Cushing (pictured, right), whose repeal bill received bipartisan legislative support in 2018, is reintroducing the measure in 2019. Voters elected a veto-proof majority of sixteen abolitionist senators in November. In the state house, where the repeal bill received just under the two-thirds supermajority necessary to overcome a veto in 2018, backers of abolition are optimistic they will have even more support in 2019.
In Oregon, voters reelected Gov. Kate Brown, who pledged to extend the state’s moratorium on executions, and elected Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. With the state constitution requiring a voter referendum to abolish the death penalty, legislators are instead seeking bipartisan support for a plan to limit capital punishment only to acts of terrorism. In Nevada, Governor-elect Steve Sisolak, who defeated state attorney general and death-penalty proponent Adam Laxalt, has indicated he is willing to sign a bill to abolish the death penalty. Assemblyman Ozzie Fumo, who favors repeal, said he expects the legislature to consider an abolition bill or to request that the governor impose a moratorium on executions. “There’s a social change coming,” Fumo said. “Overwhelmingly, we’re going to see people think about it, and say this is wrong.”
The results of the November 6, 2018 mid-term elections reflected America's deeply divided views on capital punishment, as voters elected governors who pledged not to resume executions in the three states with death-penalty moratoriums, defeated an incumbent who tried to bring back capital punishment in a non-death-penalty state (click on graphic to enlarge), and re-elected governors who had vetoed legislation abolishing capital punishment in two other states. Continuing a national trend, voters in Orange County, California ousted their scandal-plagued top prosecutor, marking the ninth time since 2015 that local voters have replaced prosecutors in jurisdictions with the nation's largest county death rows.
In the three states with Governor-imposed death-penalty moratoriums, candidates who said they would continue execution bans or work to eliminate the state’s death penalty won easily. Tom Wolf, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania who imposed the state’s moratorium on executions in 2015, was re-elected by with 57.6% of the vote. His challenger, Scott Wagner, who had promised to resume executions and had advocated a mandatory death penalty for school shootings, trailed badly with 40.8% of the vote. Oregon's incumbent Democratic governor Kate Brown, who continued the state’s death-penalty moratorium instituted in 2011 by then-governor John Kitzhaber, won re-election in a six candidate field with 49.4% of the vote, five percentage points higher than her Republican challenger Knute Buehler. In Colorado, Democratic congressman Jared Polis, who campaigned on the repeal of the state’s death penalty, won the governorship with 51.6% of the vote, outpacing Republican state treasurer Walker Stapleton, who received 44.7% of the vote. Democrats also took control of both houses of the Colorado legislature, increasing the likelihood that legislation to abolish the death penalty will be considered in the upcoming legislative session. Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner suffered an overwhelming election defeat at the hands of venture-capitalist J.B. Pritzker. Trailing badly in the polls, Rauner tried in May 2018 to condition passage of gun control legislation on reinstatement of the state’s death penalty. Pritzker outpolled Rauner by 54.0% to 39.3%.
On the other hand, two governors who prevented death-penalty repeal bills from going into effect in their states also won re-election. Nebraska's Republican Governor Pete Ricketts, who vetoed a bipartisan bill to abolish the state's death penalty in 2015 and then, after the legislature overrode his veto, personally bankrolled a successful state-wide referendum in 2016 to block the repeal, cruised to re-election with 59.4% of the vote. New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who vetoed the state’s death-penalty repeal bill in March 2018, won re-election with 52.4% of the vote. In Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis won the governorship against Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum, who had pledged, if elected, to suspend executions in Florida until he was sure the death-penalty system was nondiscriminatorily applied.
Local voters in Orange County replaced District Attorney Tony Rackauckas with a political rival, county supervisor Todd Spitzer. Rackauckas has been embroiled in a scandal involving the secret use of prison informants to obtain or manufacture confessions from suspects and then stonewalling investigation of the multi-decade illegal practice. As of January 2013, Orange County had the seventh largest death row of any county in the U.S., and since then, it has imposed the fourth most death sentences of any county.
New Hampshire Governor Christopher Sununu (pictured) has vetoed a bill that would have abolished the state's death penalty. Surrounded by law enforcement officers as he vetoed the bill on June 21, 2018, Sununu said, “[w]hile I very much respect the arguments made by proponents of this bill, I stand with crime victims, members of the law enforcement community and advocates for justice in opposing it. New Hampshire does not take the death penalty lightly and we only use it sparingly.” New Hampshire has only one person on death row, Michael Addison, who was sentenced to death for killing police officer Michael Briggs. No one has been executed in New Hampshire since 1939. The death-penalty repeal bill, which applied only to future cases, passed the state Senate by a 14-10 vote in March, and passed the House by a 223-116 vote in April. It received bipartisan support in both legislative houses. While Sununu invoked the views of crime victims and law enforcement in opposition to repeal, Rep. Renny Cushing, a repeal supporter whose father was murdered, said not all crime victims agree. “Many murder victim family members in our state paid a very painful, harsh price for the right to tell Gov. Sununu that we don't want killing in our name. The reality is that the death penalty does not do the one thing we wish it would do: bring our loved ones back.” When the repeal bill passed, Rep. Richard O’Leary, a former deputy police chief in Manchester, said he voted for the bill because “I don’t believe we have the right under any circumstances, except immediate self-defense, to take a life. Once the criminal has been subdued, arrested, segregated from society and rendered defenseless, I cannot see where the state has any compelling interest in executing him. It’s simply wrong.” This is the third time since 2000 that New Hampshire has come close to abolishing capital punishment. In 2000, Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed a repeal bill that had passed both houses of the legislature, and in 2014, a bill passed the House and garnered the support of Governor Maggie Hassan, but failed on a tie vote in the Senate. A DPIC study of 29 years of FBI homicide data found no discernible relationship between state murder trends and the presence or absence of the death penalty, and provided evidence that the death penalty has not made police officers or the public safer. The study found that murder rates in general and murders of police officers are consistently higher in states that have the death penalty and that police officers were killed at a rate 1.37 times higher in current death-penalty states than in states that had long abolished capital punishment. All six states in New England have murder rates well below the national average. Five New England states are among the ten safest states in the country for police officers. However, in New Hampshire—the only New England state with the death penalty—officers are killed at a rate higher than the national average.
In a vote death-penalty opponents praised as “historic,” a veto-proof supermajority of the New Hampshire legislature gave final approval to a bill that would repeal the state’s death penalty statute. By a vote of 17-6, the senators voted on April 11, 2019 to end capital prosecutions in the Granite State, exceeding the two-thirds majority necessary to override an anticipated veto by Governor Chris Sununu. In March, the state House of Representatives 
By an overwhelming 279-88 margin, a veto-proof majority of the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted on March 7, 2019 to repeal the state’s death penalty. Demonstrating strong bipartisan support that garnered the backing of 56 more legislators than an identical 
Bills to repeal and replace the death penalty with non-capital punishments have gained new traction across the United States in 2019 as a result of opposition to the death penalty among ideologically conservative legislators. That movement – buoyed by fiscal and pro-life conservatives, conservative law-reform advocates, and the deepening involvement of the Catholic Church in death-penalty abolition – has led to unprecedented successes in numerous houses of state legislatures and moved repeal efforts closer to fruition in a number of deeply Republican states. In 2019, conservative legislators are leading the call for death-penalty abolition in conservative-leaning states such as Wyoming, Montana, and Kentucky, and playing a critical role in 
