New Hampshire abolishes death penalty after lawmakers override governor
Source: Washington Post
Lawmakers in New Hampshire voted Thursday to abolish the death penalty, overriding a veto from the states Republican governor and making it the 21st state to abandon capital punishment.
The vote by the New Hampshire Senate capped months of uncertainty about what would happen to capital punishment in the state, the last in New England to still have the death penalty.
This debate has been largely symbolic, because New Hampshire has neither an active death penalty system nor any executions on the horizon. The state has only one person on death row Michael Addison, who was sentenced to death more than a decade ago for killing Michael Briggs, a Manchester police officer and last carried out an execution in 1939.
Addison also does not face imminent execution, as corrections officials have said they do not have any lethal injection drugs or any plan to get them. The bill debated Thursday was not retroactive, leaving Addisons sentence in place regardless of what happened.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/new-hampshire-will-abandon-death-penalty-after-lawmakers-override-governor/2019/05/30/d0bdec8e-824c-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html
Merlot
(9,696 posts)Eugene
(61,805 posts)I'm pleasantly surprised.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)It's getting bluer by the day