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.

(Josh Rogers, Sununu Vetoes Death Penalty Repeal, New Hampshire Public Radio, June 21, 2018; Dave Solomon, Sununu fol­lows through on promise to veto repeal of death penal­ty, New Hampshire Union Leader, June 21, 2018; Holly Ramer, As promised, Sununu vetoes death penal­ty repeal bill, Associated Press, June 21, 2018.) See Recent Legislative Activity and New Hampshire.

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