This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The man serving a mandatory lifetime sentence for murdering two Dartmouth College professors 24 years ago has cleared another legal hurdle in his effort to become eligible for parole.
A state Superior Court judge this week denied a request by prosecutors to reconsider his ruling on the constitutionality of the New Hampshire law mandating minors guilty of certain crimes be sentenced to life without the possibility of being released from prison.
Robert Tulloch, 43, of Chelsea, is serving two consecutive life sentences after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop at their Etna home in 2001 when he was 17 years old.
James Parker, Tulloch’s accomplice in the stabbings who was 16 at the time and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, was paroled from prison in 2024 after serving nearly all the minimum length of his 25-years-to-life sentence.
Under state law, the sentence Tulloch received was automatic given the crime despite his age. For years, he has been seeking a new sentencing hearing on grounds that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors are illegal.
In July, Judge Lawrence MacLeod of Grafton County Superior Court ruled in Tulloch’s favor.
The judge found that the state law that requires lifetime prison sentences for defendants convicted of capital offenses violates the “cruel and unusual” clause under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution when imposed on a juvenile.
State prosecutors quickly filed a motion asking MacLeod to reconsider his ruling and submitted several arguments they contended undercut the judge’s opinion.
But MacLeod, in an eight-page decision dated Oct. 20, remained unpersuaded by the state’s arguments that he erred in applying the “evolving standards of decency” that in part led him to conclude that denying any hope for parole to a juvenile violated the state’s constitution.
The ruling was within the bounds of statutes and case law that “allow consideration of facts outside of New Hampshire legislative history in determining whether LWOP sentences for minors were both ‘cruel’ and ‘unusual,’ ” McLeod wrote, using an acronym for “life without parole.”
He agreed with the defense’s claim that “juvenile LWOP could not have been understood or accepted as a penalty for crimes to the framers in 1784,” when neither sentences of life imprisonment nor prisons fitting any modern definition of the term existed.
Michael Garrity, spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Justice, said via email that department officials “will review the order and respond as appropriate in court.”
What happens next is unclear but there are at least three possible paths.
The first is the state could accept the ruling and agree to a new sentencing hearing for Tulloch. A hearing date has not yet been set but the clerk’s office is required to set a date within 30 days of the Oct. 20 decision.
The second path is that prosecutors appeal MacLeod’s ruling to the state Supreme Court, which has not yet addressed the sentencing issue and could settle the questions once and for all.
A third possibility is that prosecutors and defense attorneys avoid the uncertainty of returning to court and enter into settlement discussions to negotiate a new sentence for Tulloch.
