In 2019, New Hampshire lawmakers voted to end the use of the death penalty.
The Legislature, though, included a specific carveout: The state’s lone death row inmate, Michael Addison, was not affected by the repeal, and his death sentence would stand.
On Thursday, Addison’s lawyers were in the New Hampshire Supreme Court arguing that exclusion was unjust, and his sentence should now be overturned.
“We respectfully submit that the court should end this now,” said attorney Michael Wiseman, who is representing Addison. “We think the equity is on our side.”
Addison’s guilt is not in question. In 2006, he shot and killed Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs, who was responding to a domestic disturbance call. Briggs was 35 years old, married, and the father of two children.
New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte was the state attorney general at the time and prosecuted the case herself. In 2008, a jury found Addison guilty and sentenced him to death.
“To be sure, Mr. Addison's crime was a bad crime. There's nothing we can do to change that,” Wiseman told the justices Thursday.
But Wiseman argued that the sentence — death by lethal injection — needs to be viewed in a new light. The state hasn’t executed anyone since 1939, and he said there’s been a societal change in the past two decades in how we view capital punishment.
That was reflected in the Legislature’s decision to repeal New Hampshire’s death penalty in 2019.
“We think the law is sufficiently on our side to allow this court to exercise what we consider a duty to vacate this death sentence,” said Wiseman.
He warned about the state imposing a two-tiered system, where someone who commits the same type of crime as Addison today would only receive a life sentence, while Addison gets the death penalty.
“One could imagine the horribles, you know, hypothetically that could come down the pike: multiple murders, multiple murders of police officers, terrorist attacks. None of those people would be eligible for death under New Hampshire law,” he said. “And that is just unjust.”
This is not Addison’s first appeal, and it may not be his last.
In 2013 and then again in 2015, the state Supreme Court ruled that the death sentence handed down was justified and proportional to what other defendants convicted of similar crimes, in New Hampshire and elsewhere, may receive.
Audriana Mekula, an attorney with the New Hampshire Department of Justice, said the court can’t now reconsider that proportionality simply because the Legislature voted down the death penalty since Addison’s conviction.
“You cannot compare a man to future defendants,” she said. “That's not the way that this court set up the comparative proportionality framework. You have to compare him in the moment to individuals who are similarly situated to him.”
The jury made its decision in 2008, she argued, and the court today should honor it.
Mekula noted that the death sentence is still in use elsewhere in the country, and that applying it to one case in New Hampshire would not be excessive.
And she urged the court to consider the facts of the crime.
“Committing capital offenses against law enforcement officers in the line of duty is a very serious offense to juries throughout the country, and that is because it's an attack on the rule of law,” Mekula said. “And an attack on the rule of law is something that juries take very seriously.”
Addison was not in the courtroom for Thursday’s hearing.
Just three justices — Patrick Donovan, Melissa Countway and Bryan Gould — will decide the case. The other two current justices, Chief Gordon MacDonald and Dan Will, both previously worked in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, and recused themselves from Addison’s appeal.
