Both Democratic candidates for governor would support commuting the death sentence of Michael Addison if elected, the two men said this week, pulling the fate of New Hampshire’s only death row inmate back into the political arena.
Their shared position drew a rebuke from Kelly Ayotte, the former Republican U.S. senator who pursued the death penalty against Addison as the state’s attorney general and led the effort in court.
“At a time when law enforcement officers are facing increasingly dangerous situations every day, our leaders should be standing with law enforcement, not commuting the sentences of convicted cop killers,” Ayotte said in a statement.
In the televised debate hosted by WMUR and St. Anselm college, state senator Dan Feltes and Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky said they would move forward with a commutation of Addison’s sentence if it passed the Executive Council. The council, a five-member elected body, must approve such requests.
“I think there is a process in place with the Executive Council and the governor,” said Volinsky. “If the Council voted to commute Addison’s sentence, I would approve that.”
“I agree with Andru and that process,” Feltes followed. “Look, you put it before the Council. We repealed the death penalty. If the Council voted to do that, we would move forward with that.”
The positions are in line with those of many elected Democrats, who in recent years have increasingly supported abolishing the death penalty altogether. And the statements come a year after New Hampshire eliminated its own death penalty in a forward-looking bill that was written to have no effect on the Addison execution.
Addison was convicted in the 2006 slaying of Michael Briggs, a Manchester police officer, who was responding to a domestic disturbance call on an October evening involving Addison. Briggs had identified Addison and ordered him to stop. Addison, who was 26 at the time, turned around and shot Briggs in the head before fleeing.
Ayotte and the Department of Justice sought the death penalty for Addison – a rarity in a state that had last carried out an execution in 1939. The resulting conviction and sentence was approved by a court in 2008, and survived an appeal in the New Hampshire Supreme Court, but a litany of further appeals in both the state and federal court system has tied up the case to this day.
Whether Addison will ever actually be executed remains an open question. To start, the state lacks the infrastructure to carry out an execution, with no facility, lethal injection drugs or process established to do so.
And while the 2019 repeal of the state’s capital punishment was crafted deliberately to allow Addison’s execution to continue even if future executions could not – there is debate whether the state can legally proceed. For example, in Connecticut, the death penalty repeal was meant to be forward-looking but resulted in a judge commuting the sentences of the existing death row inmates.
Ayotte has mostly stayed on the political sidelines since she lost her re-election bid to the U.S. Senate in 2016. However, she briefly re-entered the political spotlight in 2019 to argue against the state’s death penalty repeal effort and slammed the support for a commutation.
This week she reinforced that position.
“Addison was a career criminal who shot Officer Mike Briggs in the head,” Ayotte wrote on Twitter. “He was convicted of capital murder by a jury of his peers and his conviction was upheld by the N.H. Supreme Court. It is extremely disturbing that Feltes & Volinsky choose to support this murderer.”
The political debate has also brought in questions of the role of race.
While neither Democratic candidate went as far as to say the 2006 decision by Ayotte to pursue the death penalty against Addison, a Black man, was directly motivated by racism, both said race plays a role in how the death penalty is applied in America.
Volinsky pointed to the case of John Brooks, a New Castle millionaire convicted in 2008 in the murder-for-hire killing of a handyman. The state did not pursue the death penalty in that case.
“I think that Addison and a white guy named Brooks were charged with capital murder at almost the same time,” Volinsky said during the debate. “Brooks hired someone, planned, intentionally killed his victim. The jury in Addison’s case found that he acted recklessly in killing officer Briggs.
“There is a racist component to the death penalty and it comes out in each and every case.”
Volinsky pointed to his long history of opposing the death penalty. For forty years, the attorney has represented death row clients, often in the South. When he was 30, he won an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court that spared a client from execution. In January, he flew to Georgia to help secure the commutation of a 30-year client hours before the execution was scheduled.
Volinsky also has a personal connection; he represented Addison in 2012 during an appeal of an armed robbery conviction that took place in the middle of his death row appeals.
Feltes declined to assign racial motivations to the pursuit of the death penalty against Addison, but in a comment to the Monitor, he argued that race plays a role.
“Throughout history, there has been direct and disproportionate discrimination in the application of the death penalty,” he said. “…That, along with exorbitant costs to taxpayers of death penalty cases versus life in prison, is why I helped lead the effort in the State Senate repeal the death penalty.”
Though both gubernataorial candidates said they would support a commutation, the real decision-making falls to the Executive Council, not the governor. New Hampshire’s governor controls whether an application for a commutation comes before the Council, but it is the Council that holds a hearing and must vote, by at least a 3-2 majority, in favor it.
The Council also decides the terms of the commutation – whether the sentence is converted to life without the possibility of parole, for instance, or something else.
Asked by the Monitor for their positions on a commutation of Michael Addison, the eight candidates vying to replace Volinsky in Executive Council District 2 gave a range of answers Thursday.
Many of the six Democratic candidates expressed strong opposition to the death penalty and said they would vote to commute the sentence.
That included Emmett Soldati, who said he was “vehemently” against capital punlishment and would vote to commute; Cinde Warmington, who said she would vote to commute it to life in prison without the possibility of parole “for this unconscionable act of murder; and Leah Plunkett, who argued that “the Granite State has abolished the death penalty prospectively, and that should apply retroactively as well.”
Democrat Craig Thompson said he would commute – “As I tell my kids, an eye for the eye makes the whole world blind” – but he also supported doing more. “In fact I’d go further and do away with life sentences as well,” he said. “For all practical purposes, those over the age of 75 don’t commit crimes … yet cost us over $40,000 a year to incarcerate.”
And Democrat Jay Surdukowski broke from the pack somewhat, stating that he would not weigh in on a commutation hearing that hadn’t happened yet. “Out of fairness and respect to the Briggs and Addison families, I would not prejudge any commutation and would keep an open mind until we hear testimony,” he said.
John Shea, the sixth Democratic candidate, was not available for comment Thursday.
Among the two Republicans seeking the Council seat, the answers were also mixed.
Stewart Levenson said that he couldn’t comment on a specific case “or it may lead to grounds for a legal appeal once I am on the Council.” But he said he supports the death penalty in some cases.
“As a (former) ER doctor in NYC I’ve seen pure evil,” Levenson said. “When innocent people are brutally killed and the perpetrator understands his actions, yet shows no remorse, I can think of no other appropriate punishment.”
Jim Beard was unequivocal: He would not vote to commute. “Out of respect for the family of the officer brutally killed and our brave law enforcement, I would vote to carry out the sentence and not commute,” he said.
The Democratic primary for governor and Democratic and Republican primaries for Executive Council are Tuesday, Sept. 8.