New Hampshire's Legislative Study Commission on the Death Penalty
More than 150 people attended the hearing at Plymouth State University. The study commission heard from numerous witnesses, most in favor of abolishing the death penalty. One man testified about how he listened as a child to the jury deliberate in the 1939 case, which was New Hampshire's last execution.
The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for “the worst of the worst,” says Matthew Campbell, a veteran prosecutor from Maryland. If that’s the case, Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for planning and carrying out the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was surely in that category.
But Bud Welch, whose 23-year-old daughter, Julie, was one of the 168 people murdered that day, says even in that extreme case the death penalty serves no useful function. Both Campbell and Welch addressed New Hampshire Death Penalty Study Commission, which met in Concord September 10.
“Nothing about the killing of Timothy McVeigh brought me any peace,” Welch told the Commissioners, whose members include three relatives of homicide victims. “The death penalty retards the healing process,” he said.
Campbell was a local prosecutor for 25 years and served on a Maryland study commission similar to the one he addressed in Concord. He pointed out that the US Supreme Court states that the death penalty can only be used in a manner that is fair and equitable, free from error, and free from bias. But reaching that standard “can’t be done,” he has concluded.
Speaking to the study commission, which includes several current and former homicide prosecutors, Campbell reviewed several Maryland cases, including one in which a hired killer was sentenced to death but the man who hired him and carefully plotted out the murder of his own wife and child was spared. “However we week to employ the death penalty, fallible people have to decide,” he said.
Dick Gerry, warden of the NH State Prison in Concord, described the conditions under which prisoners serving life sentences are incarcerated. Contrary to a notion that those serving life sentences might act recklessly, he said they have “a calming influence on the institution.”
Barbara Keshen, a former prosecutor and public defender who now chairs the NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, played a recorded telephone message from the Victims Assistance office in the attorney general’s office which has been understaffed for months due to lack of resources at the same time the department was spending millions and continues to spend millions to secure a single death penalty. She also displayed a photo of a former client who came close to being tried on capital charges for a crime he did not commit. “We are deluding ourselves to think we would not run an ultimate risk of putting someone who is innocent to death,” she said.
Keshen said the millions of dollars that go to death penalty cases should be directed instead to victims’ assistance, “cold case” prosecutions, and law enforcement.
On Thursday, September 16 the NH Legislative Study Commission on the Death Penalty met at Keene State College to take public testimony on the death penalty. On September 30, the Commission met at the University of New Hampshire at Durham to take public testimony. Hundreds of people attended the hearings. Testimony was overwhelmingly in support of abolishing the death penalty.
In August, the Study Commission heard testimony on the impact of the death penalty on corrections officers and the possibility of expanding the death penalty. The date for the hearing was changed in July, but several witnesses still testified. Ron McAndrew, Allen Ault (via a video) and Laura Bonk all testified against the death penalty, while Robert Blecker testified for the alteration and expansion of the death penalty in New Hampshire.
Ron McAndrew and Allen Ault were both prison wardens, in Florida and Georgia, respectively. They described the psychological trauma of taking a life, despite being aware of the atrocious crimes that person has committed. McAndrew has “been haunted by the men I was asked to execute in the name of the state of Florida.” McAndrew also made it clear that his experiences are not unique. He has received countless calls from other corrections officers, with whom he “spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through.” Ault described execution as “premeditated murder” and “gruesome, any way you do it.” Both men believed it was dishonorable for a state to ask its civil servants to engage in this sort of work.
Professor Robert Blecker, a law professor from New York, also testified, but conveyed an entirely different message. Professor Blecker has made himself into an expert on the death penalty, interviewing hundreds of inmates and willingly witnessing executions. He believes in “retributive justice,” or proportionate punishment (an eye for an eye, etc). Blecker also did not seem disturbed by the permutations of this sort of logic. He seemed to relish the idea of others suffering (so long as they “deserved” it) and cared more about punishment than the safety of corrections officers, who are statistically safer in prisons with privileges that can be revoked for bad behavior. Most shockingly, Professor Blacker said that he apposed lethal injection for the worst criminals because it was “too painless . . . <murders> go out in an opiate haze.” He supported more painful death sentences, such as electrocution, in these circumstances.
Laura Bonk also gave an emotional testimony, against the death penalty. Ms. Bonk’s mother, who staunchly apposed the death penalty, was murdered in 1989. Bonk said the death penalty “does not bring closure. It does not bring the victim back. It does not solve anything.” She implored the Study Commission to “honor me and, most importantly, my mother” by repealing the death penalty.
This month, the Death Penalty Study Commission met to hear testimony concerning the decision to seek the death penalty in New Hampshire. The Commission meeting was held on June 18, 2010. Four witnesses testified: Senior Assistant Attorneys General Jeffrey Strelzin and William Delker; former Chief Justice of the NH Supreme Court Joseph P. Nadeau; and Attorney Alan Cronheim.
Strelzin and Delker, two of the prosecutors in the recent Addison case, discussed the method by which the NH Department of Justice decides when to ask for the death penalty. The two witnesses said that prosecutors considering whether to seek the death penalty follow strict, systematic guidelines to ensure consistency. These guidelines are not available to the public. Strelzin and Delker also assured the Commission that these decisions were not hastily made and were independent of political and social pressure, despite the fact that Attorney General Kelly Ayotte announced her intention to seek the death penalty hours after Addison was arrested.
Justice Nadeau testified about the “moral issue of death as punishment.” Justice Nadeau argued that our justice system makes too many mistakes to impose a punishment that can never be reversed. His full statement can be viewed here.
Lastly, Alan Cronheim testified about his experiences with the 1988 Kenneth Johnson homicide. Johnson was accused of hiring two teenagers, Anthony Pfaff and Jason Carroll, to kill his pregnant wife, Sharon Johnson. All three men were charged with capital murder, but none were convicted of that offense. Cronheim and other members of his firm defended Pfaff, who was acquitted after trial. Carroll was convicted and 46 years in prison for second degree murder. The cases against Pfaff and Johnson were dropped after details given in Carroll’s confession did not match the facts of the case, leading to the conclusion that the confession was coerced. In addition, misconduct on the part of police investigators was a factor. Cronheim testified about the uncertainty, confusion, and mistakes that undermine capital cases. He also spoke about the fallibility of “eyewitness” accounts.
The Commission will skip the month of July, holding its next meeting on August 6, 2010 at 9:30 a.m. at the Legislative Office Building in Concord.
On May 14, 2010, the NH Legislative Study Commission on the Death Penalty met to discuss the evolving moral standards concerning capital punishment. Religious leaders from several different faiths testified at the Commission meeting, along with the co-director of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck, and Joshua Rubenstein, the northeast regional director of Amnesty International. All of the witnesses testified in opposition to the death penalty.
One of the witnesses, Bishop Francis Christian, said “the state that unnecessarily uses, or even legalizes, capital punishment unwittingly adopts the moral calculus of the killer, who regards killing as an acceptable means to an end.” Other religious leaders agreed with this sentiment. David Lamarre-Vincent, executive director of the NH Council of Churches, presented a letter signed by 186 New Hampshire religious leaders, which condemned capital punishment.
Information from the Concord Monitor article “Death Penalty Condemned” by Ben Leubsdorf, May 15, 2010.
Study Commission Told there is No Evidence the Death Penalty Deters Murder
Arnie Alpert
April 14, 2010
If the death penalty had any effect on rates of violent crime it would show up in statistical comparisons of jurisdictions with the death penalty to those without it. Or it would show up in statistics when states change their laws one way or the other, or in the aftermath of publicized executions. But according to a criminologist and a mathematician who testified at a recent meeting of New Hampshire’s death penalty study commission, there is no reputable statistical evidence for a deterrent effect. “There may be other reasons to support the death penalty,” said Tomislav Kovandzic from the University of Texas at Dallas, “but the belief that it deters murder should not be one of them.”
Deterrence was the theme of the April 9 meeting, the Commission’s sixth since it was created by a 2009 act of the legislature. Each session has taken up a specific question based on the group’s statutory mandate, which in this case included “Whether the death penalty in New Hampshire rationally serves a legitimate public interest such as general deterrence, specific deterrence, punishment, or instilling confidence in the criminal justice system.”
John Lamperti, a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dartmouth, has been looking at the statistical evidence for deterrence for some time. Defending the use of statistics in general and describing the difference between correlation and cause, he said in written testimony, “We must define the question correctly. We are not asking whether the threat of punishment, in general, deters crime, nor whether there should be heavy penalties for murder. The issue at stake is this: Does capital punishment, in a form that could be practiced in the United States, provide a better deterrent to murder than long imprisonment?” Lamperti’s conclusion is that there is no statistical evidence for a positive answer to that question.
Kovandzic has taken the issue further. Not satisfied with the reliability of earlier studies, the criminologist conducted his own, using complex computer models and data from 1977 to 2006 from both the FBI and CDC. In a paper published last year in a scholarly journal, Criminology and Public Policy, Kovandzic and his co-authors found “no evidence that presence of the DP or increases in any of nine execution risk measures studied reduce murder rates,” he said. Acknowledging that some researchers have reached other conclusions, he told the commission members, “You have to torture the data to come to a conclusion that there’s a deterrent effect of the death penalty.”
While no one testified that there is a deterrent effect, the Commission did hear from several law enforcement officers who defended the death penalty, especially when applied to those who murder police officers. “The death penalty in New Hampshire is here for a reason,” said Belknap Country Sheriff Craig Wiggin, who said he doesn’t know whether it deters or not. But the death penalty “represents a vote of confidence in us,” he said.
Jill Rockey, a 15-year State Trooper, said she thinks the death penalty gives a choice to victims’ family members, even those who oppose capital punishment. But Gail Rice, whose police officer brother was murdered in Denver, said her long career working with offenders has given her a different view. Prior to the murder of her brother, Bruce CanderJagt, in 1997, Rice believed that “many criminals’ lives could be restored and redeemed, and that a restorative justice system was worth fighting for,” she told the Commission. “I still believe that today,” she added, “and I believe that there is nothing about that death penalty that is in any way restorative.”
According to Rice, a member of Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, the death penalty is actually harmful to the family members of murder victims. “In cases where executions are actually carried out, survivors are often further devastated to find out that the execution does not bring them the peace and closure promised to them,” she testified.
The Commission also heard from Ray Krone, who spent 2 ½ years on Arizona’s death row and another 8 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. “I don’t want anyone killed in my name,” said Krone, who was the 100th person released from death row due to innocence in recent years. There is now way to estimate the number of innocent people who have been sentenced to prison, he said. “It can happen to anyone.”
Arnie Alpert is New Hampshire Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee and a member of the steering committee of the NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The Study Commission issued its report on December 1, 2010. The Commission agreed that the death penalty is substantially more expensive than life without the possibility of parole, which is currently available in New Hampshire. The Commission also agreed that the death penalty should not be expanded. To read the full report, click here.
Hearing Summaries
September Study Commission Hearings More than 150 people attended the hearing at Plymouth State University. The study commission heard from numerous witnesses, most in favor of abolishing the death penalty. One man testified about how he listened as a child to the jury deliberate in the 1939 case, which was New Hampshire's last execution.
The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for “the worst of the worst,” says Matthew Campbell, a veteran prosecutor from Maryland. If that’s the case, Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for planning and carrying out the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, was surely in that category.
But Bud Welch, whose 23-year-old daughter, Julie, was one of the 168 people murdered that day, says even in that extreme case the death penalty serves no useful function. Both Campbell and Welch addressed New Hampshire Death Penalty Study Commission, which met in Concord September 10.
“Nothing about the killing of Timothy McVeigh brought me any peace,” Welch told the Commissioners, whose members include three relatives of homicide victims. “The death penalty retards the healing process,” he said.
Campbell was a local prosecutor for 25 years and served on a Maryland study commission similar to the one he addressed in Concord. He pointed out that the US Supreme Court states that the death penalty can only be used in a manner that is fair and equitable, free from error, and free from bias. But reaching that standard “can’t be done,” he has concluded.
Speaking to the study commission, which includes several current and former homicide prosecutors, Campbell reviewed several Maryland cases, including one in which a hired killer was sentenced to death but the man who hired him and carefully plotted out the murder of his own wife and child was spared. “However we week to employ the death penalty, fallible people have to decide,” he said.
Dick Gerry, warden of the NH State Prison in Concord, described the conditions under which prisoners serving life sentences are incarcerated. Contrary to a notion that those serving life sentences might act recklessly, he said they have “a calming influence on the institution.”
Barbara Keshen, a former prosecutor and public defender who now chairs the NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, played a recorded telephone message from the Victims Assistance office in the attorney general’s office which has been understaffed for months due to lack of resources at the same time the department was spending millions and continues to spend millions to secure a single death penalty. She also displayed a photo of a former client who came close to being tried on capital charges for a crime he did not commit. “We are deluding ourselves to think we would not run an ultimate risk of putting someone who is innocent to death,” she said.
Keshen said the millions of dollars that go to death penalty cases should be directed instead to victims’ assistance, “cold case” prosecutions, and law enforcement.
On Thursday, September 16 the NH Legislative Study Commission on the Death Penalty met at Keene State College to take public testimony on the death penalty. On September 30, the Commission met at the University of New Hampshire at Durham to take public testimony. Hundreds of people attended the hearings. Testimony was overwhelmingly in support of abolishing the death penalty.
August Study Commission Hearing
In August, the Study Commission heard testimony on the impact of the death penalty on corrections officers and the possibility of expanding the death penalty. The date for the hearing was changed in July, but several witnesses still testified. Ron McAndrew, Allen Ault (via a video) and Laura Bonk all testified against the death penalty, while Robert Blecker testified for the alteration and expansion of the death penalty in New Hampshire.
Ron McAndrew and Allen Ault were both prison wardens, in Florida and Georgia, respectively. They described the psychological trauma of taking a life, despite being aware of the atrocious crimes that person has committed. McAndrew has “been haunted by the men I was asked to execute in the name of the state of Florida.” McAndrew also made it clear that his experiences are not unique. He has received countless calls from other corrections officers, with whom he “spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through.” Ault described execution as “premeditated murder” and “gruesome, any way you do it.” Both men believed it was dishonorable for a state to ask its civil servants to engage in this sort of work.
Professor Robert Blecker, a law professor from New York, also testified, but conveyed an entirely different message. Professor Blecker has made himself into an expert on the death penalty, interviewing hundreds of inmates and willingly witnessing executions. He believes in “retributive justice,” or proportionate punishment (an eye for an eye, etc). Blecker also did not seem disturbed by the permutations of this sort of logic. He seemed to relish the idea of others suffering (so long as they “deserved” it) and cared more about punishment than the safety of corrections officers, who are statistically safer in prisons with privileges that can be revoked for bad behavior. Most shockingly, Professor Blacker said that he apposed lethal injection for the worst criminals because it was “too painless . . . <murders> go out in an opiate haze.” He supported more painful death sentences, such as electrocution, in these circumstances.
Laura Bonk also gave an emotional testimony, against the death penalty. Ms. Bonk’s mother, who staunchly apposed the death penalty, was murdered in 1989. Bonk said the death penalty “does not bring closure. It does not bring the victim back. It does not solve anything.” She implored the Study Commission to “honor me and, most importantly, my mother” by repealing the death penalty.
June Study Commission Hearing
This month, the Death Penalty Study Commission met to hear testimony concerning the decision to seek the death penalty in New Hampshire. The Commission meeting was held on June 18, 2010. Four witnesses testified: Senior Assistant Attorneys General Jeffrey Strelzin and William Delker; former Chief Justice of the NH Supreme Court Joseph P. Nadeau; and Attorney Alan Cronheim.
Strelzin and Delker, two of the prosecutors in the recent Addison case, discussed the method by which the NH Department of Justice decides when to ask for the death penalty. The two witnesses said that prosecutors considering whether to seek the death penalty follow strict, systematic guidelines to ensure consistency. These guidelines are not available to the public. Strelzin and Delker also assured the Commission that these decisions were not hastily made and were independent of political and social pressure, despite the fact that Attorney General Kelly Ayotte announced her intention to seek the death penalty hours after Addison was arrested.
Justice Nadeau testified about the “moral issue of death as punishment.” Justice Nadeau argued that our justice system makes too many mistakes to impose a punishment that can never be reversed. His full statement can be viewed here.
Lastly, Alan Cronheim testified about his experiences with the 1988 Kenneth Johnson homicide. Johnson was accused of hiring two teenagers, Anthony Pfaff and Jason Carroll, to kill his pregnant wife, Sharon Johnson. All three men were charged with capital murder, but none were convicted of that offense. Cronheim and other members of his firm defended Pfaff, who was acquitted after trial. Carroll was convicted and 46 years in prison for second degree murder. The cases against Pfaff and Johnson were dropped after details given in Carroll’s confession did not match the facts of the case, leading to the conclusion that the confession was coerced. In addition, misconduct on the part of police investigators was a factor. Cronheim testified about the uncertainty, confusion, and mistakes that undermine capital cases. He also spoke about the fallibility of “eyewitness” accounts.
The Commission will skip the month of July, holding its next meeting on August 6, 2010 at 9:30 a.m. at the Legislative Office Building in Concord.
May Study Commission Hearing
On May 14, 2010, the NH Legislative Study Commission on the Death Penalty met to discuss the evolving moral standards concerning capital punishment. Religious leaders from several different faiths testified at the Commission meeting, along with the co-director of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck, and Joshua Rubenstein, the northeast regional director of Amnesty International. All of the witnesses testified in opposition to the death penalty.
One of the witnesses, Bishop Francis Christian, said “the state that unnecessarily uses, or even legalizes, capital punishment unwittingly adopts the moral calculus of the killer, who regards killing as an acceptable means to an end.” Other religious leaders agreed with this sentiment. David Lamarre-Vincent, executive director of the NH Council of Churches, presented a letter signed by 186 New Hampshire religious leaders, which condemned capital punishment.
Information from the Concord Monitor article “Death Penalty Condemned” by Ben Leubsdorf, May 15, 2010.
April Study Commission Hearing
Study Commission Told there is No Evidence the Death Penalty Deters Murder
Arnie Alpert
April 14, 2010
If the death penalty had any effect on rates of violent crime it would show up in statistical comparisons of jurisdictions with the death penalty to those without it. Or it would show up in statistics when states change their laws one way or the other, or in the aftermath of publicized executions. But according to a criminologist and a mathematician who testified at a recent meeting of New Hampshire’s death penalty study commission, there is no reputable statistical evidence for a deterrent effect. “There may be other reasons to support the death penalty,” said Tomislav Kovandzic from the University of Texas at Dallas, “but the belief that it deters murder should not be one of them.”
Deterrence was the theme of the April 9 meeting, the Commission’s sixth since it was created by a 2009 act of the legislature. Each session has taken up a specific question based on the group’s statutory mandate, which in this case included “Whether the death penalty in New Hampshire rationally serves a legitimate public interest such as general deterrence, specific deterrence, punishment, or instilling confidence in the criminal justice system.”
John Lamperti, a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dartmouth, has been looking at the statistical evidence for deterrence for some time. Defending the use of statistics in general and describing the difference between correlation and cause, he said in written testimony, “We must define the question correctly. We are not asking whether the threat of punishment, in general, deters crime, nor whether there should be heavy penalties for murder. The issue at stake is this: Does capital punishment, in a form that could be practiced in the United States, provide a better deterrent to murder than long imprisonment?” Lamperti’s conclusion is that there is no statistical evidence for a positive answer to that question.
Kovandzic has taken the issue further. Not satisfied with the reliability of earlier studies, the criminologist conducted his own, using complex computer models and data from 1977 to 2006 from both the FBI and CDC. In a paper published last year in a scholarly journal, Criminology and Public Policy, Kovandzic and his co-authors found “no evidence that presence of the DP or increases in any of nine execution risk measures studied reduce murder rates,” he said. Acknowledging that some researchers have reached other conclusions, he told the commission members, “You have to torture the data to come to a conclusion that there’s a deterrent effect of the death penalty.”
While no one testified that there is a deterrent effect, the Commission did hear from several law enforcement officers who defended the death penalty, especially when applied to those who murder police officers. “The death penalty in New Hampshire is here for a reason,” said Belknap Country Sheriff Craig Wiggin, who said he doesn’t know whether it deters or not. But the death penalty “represents a vote of confidence in us,” he said.
Jill Rockey, a 15-year State Trooper, said she thinks the death penalty gives a choice to victims’ family members, even those who oppose capital punishment. But Gail Rice, whose police officer brother was murdered in Denver, said her long career working with offenders has given her a different view. Prior to the murder of her brother, Bruce CanderJagt, in 1997, Rice believed that “many criminals’ lives could be restored and redeemed, and that a restorative justice system was worth fighting for,” she told the Commission. “I still believe that today,” she added, “and I believe that there is nothing about that death penalty that is in any way restorative.”
According to Rice, a member of Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, the death penalty is actually harmful to the family members of murder victims. “In cases where executions are actually carried out, survivors are often further devastated to find out that the execution does not bring them the peace and closure promised to them,” she testified.
The Commission also heard from Ray Krone, who spent 2 ½ years on Arizona’s death row and another 8 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. “I don’t want anyone killed in my name,” said Krone, who was the 100th person released from death row due to innocence in recent years. There is now way to estimate the number of innocent people who have been sentenced to prison, he said. “It can happen to anyone.”
Arnie Alpert is New Hampshire Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee and a member of the steering committee of the NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
NH Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
Our Allies and Partners
Resources
These groups provide information New Hampshire Facts
about the death penalty. about the Death Penalty
about the death penalty. about the Death Penalty
The American Civil Liberties Union
Capital Punishment Project
Innocence Fact Sheet
American Friends Service Committee
Victim Family Member Fact Sheet
Amnesty International
Trauma Fact Sheet
Catholic Campaign to End the Death Penalty
Cost Fact Sheet
NHCADP Brochure
HB 162 Fact Sheet
Death Penalty Information Center
Death Penalty Focus
Equal Justice USA
The Innocence Project
The Justice Project
Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty
The Moratorium Campaign
Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund
National Coaltion to Abolish the Death Penalty
NH Civil Liberties Union
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project
Witness to Innocence
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