New Hampshire, which is con­sid­er­ing a bill to repeal the death penal­ty, only has one inmate on death row – Michael Addison, who was con­vict­ed of killing a police offi­cer. Now that offi­cer’s for­mer part­ner, John Breckenridge (pic­tured), has had a change of heart about the death penal­ty and is call­ing for an end to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Initially, Breckenridge sup­port­ed a death sen­tence for Addison, and even spoke in favor of the death penal­ty before the state’s death penal­ty com­mis­sion. However, he said his reli­gious faith and con­ver­sa­tions with Sister Helen Prejean led him to change his mind: ​“Given the Catholic view on the sanc­ti­ty of life and our mod­ern prison sys­tem and the means we have to pro­tect soci­ety, it became clear to me that as a Catholic I could not jus­ti­fy the very pre-med­i­tat­ed act of exe­cut­ing some­one who – for all the evil of his crime and all the per­ma­nent hurt he caused oth­ers – still lives … in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spir­i­tu­al redemp­tion. That’s where my jour­ney brought me. Do I want to vis­it Michael Addison or invite him into my home? I do not. Do I occa­sion­al­ly pray for him and his fam­i­ly? I do.” Read the op-ed below.

Ex-police officer Breckinridge: I choose life – for myself and Michael Addison

By JOHN BRECKINRIDGE with GARY BOUCHARD

For the Monitor

I’m a Catholic. Like most Catholics these three words have meant very dif­fer­ent things on a jour­ney that has tak­en me to places I nev­er could have imag­ined and nev­er would have desired to go.

I was born in Andover, Mass., at a time when Sunday best still meant some­thing. Many women still wore dress­es and veils to church. Men wore suits, and peo­ple still car­ried Sunday missals. By high school in the late 1970s the world and every­thing in it was more casu­al. I involved myself in youth group and T.E.C. (Teens Encounter Christ). I made mem­o­rable trips to Camp Fatima in New Hampshire and formed good rela­tion­ships with local priests whom I remain in touch with today. My faith was active, if unchallenged.

Then, like many young peo­ple, when I moved away to col­lege I left reli­gious prac­tice at home. This is iron­ic since the place I came to school was Saint Anselm College in Manchester, and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to deep­en my faith had nev­er been greater. I didn’t wage a protest against my reli­gion or even active­ly retreat from it. Like many peo­ple at that age I just let it fade away with­out much of a struggle.

Meanwhile, the road before me unfold­ed in the usu­al ways it does for a young man doing the things he is sup­posed to do. I majored in psy­chol­o­gy and began a career as a social work­er to help peo­ple. I fell in love, got mar­ried and had kids. Then I became a Manchester police offi­cer. Being a cop chal­lenged me and offered me a shared sense of pur­pose that most peo­ple nev­er expe­ri­ence on the job. It also showed me every day for 22 years the very worst in human beings.

I had already fall­en away from the Church and now, one inci­dent report at a time, I was steadi­ly los­ing faith in human­i­ty. Like most cops I acquired a tough and resilient veneer that con­cealed a mount­ing cyn­i­cism and anger. When my wife asked me how things went at work, I’d say, ​“Fine.” When my chil­dren mis­be­haved I’d snap at them. I’m sure I thought that I was leav­ing my work at the sta­tion, but the sort of deprav­i­ty and pain you see each day as a police offi­cer isn’t easy to shut away in your lock­er at the end of the shift. Instead you tend to lock it away inside, where, if you aren’t care­ful, it can steadi­ly cor­rode you from within.

I fig­ured I was care­ful. I enjoyed great cama­raderie on the force, good rela­tion­ships with good men and women, and even some fun along the way. When I both­ered to think about it, I still rec­og­nized that God exist­ed, but I had a hard time rec­on­cil­ing a belief in a lov­ing God with the sort of things I saw in the city on a daily basis.

Oct. 16, 2006

Then in the very ear­ly hours of Oct. 16, 2006, some­thing hap­pened that near­ly every­one in New Hampshire knows well enough to tell their own ver­sion of the sto­ry. Here’s mine.

At about 1:45 a.m. my part­ner, Officer Michael Briggs, and I received a report of gun­shots fired in a sec­ond-floor apart­ment on Lake Street. After inves­ti­gat­ing the apart­ment, we decid­ed to check a lead before return­ing to the sta­tion. We rode our bikes east on Lake Avenue, then north on Lincoln Street to Litchfield Lane, nei­ther of us con­sid­er­ing when we entered that alley that it would mean the end of Michael’s life and an irrev­o­ca­ble change to my own.

The details of what hap­pened next are all part of offi­cial court records and are the sort of thing we have all seen too often on TV, only there would be no hap­py end­ing at the end of the episode. After approach­ing and com­mand­ing a hood­ed sus­pect to stop three times, Briggs was shot at close range. I watched him fall, drew my weapon and shot four rounds at the flee­ing man whom I and the rest of New Hampshire would come to know as Michael Addison, who today resides in the Concord state prison as an inmate on death row.

On the morn­ing of Oct. 17, Michael Briggs died for sim­ply and brave­ly doing his duty as an offi­cer. In the days, weeks, months and years after that fate­ful night I trav­eled on a dark, down­ward spi­ral. I hat­ed Michael’s killer. I hat­ed every crim­i­nal I saw. I hat­ed the crimes they com­mit­ted and the pain they caused. I drank. I drank more. I hurt my fam­i­ly. I hurt the friends who tried to help. When the tri­al start­ed in 2008, any heal­ing that might have occurred before that was shat­tered as I was forced to con­front Michael’s killer, relive every hor­rid detail of that night under the scruti­ny of the court, and watch Michael’s fam­i­ly con­tin­ue to suffer.

Around that same time there was a com­mis­sion appoint­ed to study the death penal­ty in New Hampshire. I attend­ed and lis­tened to the anti-death penal­ty peo­ple car­ry on about the costs and imprac­ti­cal­i­ty of the penal­ty, its dis­pro­por­tion­ate appli­ca­tion to minori­ties. I was infu­ri­at­ed! I had watched Michael Addison kill my part­ner, and now we were sup­posed to spend our mon­ey to feed this guy so he could read books, watch cable TV, and work out? We were sup­posed to take the risk that some judge 20 years down the road might com­mute his sen­tence? Let’s put him to death and get it over with! I tes­ti­fied to the com­mit­tee to keep the death penalty.

Maybe I felt bet­ter hav­ing vent­ed my anger in pub­lic. The death penal­ty was kept in place. Addison’s life would become that of a pris­on­er whose life is punc­tu­at­ed by unend­ing and pro­longed appeals in a cir­cuitous legal sys­tem. My own life, mean­while, would con­tin­ue on its inevitable descent. I was liv­ing on a friend’s pull­out couch and my fam­i­ly was crum­bling. That was the bot­tom. From there it would be a slow, ago­niz­ing climb upward – a climb that, owing to the courage and love of my saint­ly wife, I did not have to make alone. When she and I sat before a mar­riage coun­selor for the first time and described our prob­lems, he looked at us, shook his head, and spoke an exple­tive. We had seri­ous work to do. I had seri­ous work to do. The climb began.

New job, new life

It would lead to a famil­iar place. I retired from the Manchester police depart­ment in 2010 and took a job as a secu­ri­ty guard on the very cam­pus where I had begun to shed my faith two decades ear­li­er. Returning to Saint Anselm gave me the feel­ing of com­ing home, and after just a few weeks changes began to hap­pen. I start­ed to be able to deal with peo­ple with­out assum­ing the worst about them. I reac­quaint­ed myself with some of the monks I had known in my stu­dent days. I began to feel com­fort­able in groups again. As the new guy, I was assigned to the night shift, which meant long hours when there was lit­tle activ­i­ty, so I began read­ing quite a bit. I might even have prayed some, and I began to be drawn back to the Church. My Mass atten­dance shift­ed from spo­radic to reg­u­lar, and when I went I was actu­al­ly an active par­tic­i­pant instead of a passive guest.

I was still angry. I still want­ed Michael Briggs’s killer put to death. Then came a new bish­op and an old movie. I was read­ing an inter­view with Bishop Peter Libasci in Parable, the mag­a­zine of the Manchester Diocese, short­ly after he arrived in New Hampshire. He men­tioned that his favorite movie was Song of Bernadette. I had nev­er seen it and I’m a suck­er for old movies, so dur­ing the qui­et of the night shift I found the movie on YouTube and watched it. I loved it. Then I moved on to 1950s Bible epics like the 1951 clas­sic Quo Vadis. In one scene Nero, the noto­ri­ous per­se­cu­tor of Christians, appears before the crowd. A woman in the crowd shouts at him, call­ing him ​“a beast!” Saint Peter hears her and tells her: ​“No man is a beast. Look at him and know that he is but sick, sick in heart and spir­it, in his soul.”

A sacred gift from God

I enjoyed the movie, but those words of Saint Peter wouldn’t leave my head. During the qui­et of my rounds at night I began stop­ping into the Abbey church. As I began to pray more and more and to use my long neglect­ed rosary, those words from the film worked their way down into my heart. Around this time Sister Helen Prejean came to cam­pus as a speak­er. Sister Helen is a well-known advo­cate against the death penal­ty. Her work was dra­ma­tized in the film Dead Man Walking. I entered the pre­sen­ta­tion still ratio­nal­iz­ing my stance that a Catholic could sup­port the death penal­ty. I lis­tened atten­tive­ly to Sister Helen and even spoke to her after­ward, explain­ing my predica­ment. She lis­tened and didn’t try to push her view on me. I came away still con­flict­ed, but what had hit home were the spir­i­tu­al argu­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly that life is a sacred gift from God that should not be willfully destroyed.

As my spir­i­tu­al climb con­tin­ued, so did my under­stand­ing. I began attend­ing a Bible study group at my parish, Saint Catherine’s. There my pre­vi­ous­ly naive and unques­tioned faith ran up against Saint Paul. Here was a guy who had been an enthu­si­as­tic and vio­lent attack­er of the Church, pur­pose­ly dis­man­tling it as much as he could. Then he real­ized his errors, gave him­self to God’s will, and was redeemed by God’s grace. He went from being an attack­er of the Church to one of its fore­most evan­ge­lists. Who couldn’t admire a man like that?

As I strug­gled with my view on the death penal­ty, there stood Paul, implor­ing: ​“Never pay back evil for evil to any­one. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If pos­si­ble, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is writ­ten, ​‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord.” (Romans 12: 17 – 19) And long before Saint Paul the prophet Ezekiel had writ­ten: “ ​‘Do I have any plea­sure in the death of the wicked,’ declares the Lord God, ​‘rather than that he should turn from his ways and live?’ ” (Ezekiel 18:23)

I took my strug­gle to reli­gious teach­ers, to priests. The com­mon thread was clear: ​“The fun­da­men­tal dig­ni­ty of human life.” In his encycli­cal Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), John Paul II wrote that ​“man is called to the full­ness of life which far exceeds the dimen­sions of his earth­ly exis­tence, because it con­sists in shar­ing the very life of God.” The entire encycli­cal reaf­firms the divine gift that we all have received, name­ly, life itself. The pope also reaf­firmed the teach­ing of the Catechism that the death penal­ty could be jus­ti­fied only if it was absolute­ly nec­es­sary to defend society.

Praying for Addison

Given the Catholic view on the sanc­ti­ty of life and our mod­ern prison sys­tem and the means we have to pro­tect soci­ety, it became clear to me that as a Catholic I could not jus­ti­fy the very pre-med­i­tat­ed act of exe­cut­ing some­one who – for all the evil of his crime and all the per­ma­nent hurt he caused oth­ers – still lives, like Saint Paul did, in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of spir­i­tu­al redemp­tion. That’s where my jour­ney brought me. Do I want to vis­it Michael Addison or invite him into my home? I do not. Do I occa­sion­al­ly pray for him and his fam­i­ly? I do.

This past Oct. 16, in the chilly ear­ly morn­ing hours, I made my way once more to the alley in Manchester where Michael Briggs was shot. It is an annu­al pil­grim­age that many of us have shared since that hor­rif­ic night. Michael’s fam­i­ly, fel­low offi­cers, and friends gath­er in vig­il in the dark. Honor, love, and sor­row hang heavy in the air and in our hearts. This year nobody said a word. After a while we qui­et­ly went our sep­a­rate ways. The place to which I return from that annu­al vig­il is dif­fer­ent for me today than in years past because, well …

I’m a Catholic. And today those three words mean more to me than I ever thought they would, includ­ing the loss of sev­er­al friends who can­not under­stand how a guy who has seen what I have seen could go from speak­ing pub­licly in favor of the death penal­ty to tes­ti­fy­ing against it. It has not been an easy jour­ney and ulti­mate­ly I didn’t make the change. I just descend­ed until I hit a hum­ble enough spot in life where all I could do is ask God for for­give­ness. He gave it uncon­di­tion­al­ly. As the receiv­er of that gift, who am I rob it from some­one else? Even my worst enemy.

(This col­umn first appeared in ​“Parable,” the mag­a­zine of the Diocese of Manchester.)

(J. Breckenridge with G. Bouchard, ​“Ex-police offi­cer Breckinridge: I choose life – for myself and Michael Addison,” Concord Monitor, January 16, 2014). See New Voices and Religious Views.