Court Cases

New Hampshire has not executed anyone since 1939, and its death row has only one inhabitant, Michael Addison, an African-American man convicted in 2008 of killing a White police officer. In 2010, the New Hampshire Supreme Court had its first occasion to conduct what is known as “proportionality review,” an appellate procedure aimed at ensuring that death sentences are proportional to sentences given in similar cases, not freakish wanton or random, and not based on race or prejudice. In 2009, the ACLU-NH and ACLU Capital Punishment Project and Racial Justice Program filed an amicus brief with the Court proposing methods for how the Court can design its proportionality review to accomplish these goals. The Court issued its decision in State v. Addison, 160 N.H. 732 (2010), where it outlined the framework of the comparative proportionality review to be followed. In 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme agreed to reexamine whether Mr. Addison's death sentence is proportional in light of the legislature’s 2019 repeal of the death penalty. On October 30, 2025, the ACLU-NH, ACLU Capital Punishment Project, and several death penalty scholars filed an amicus brief as part of this review. This brief makes three arguments. First, the Court should prioritize the evidence of contemporary community values conveyed by the legislature’s 2019 bipartisan and overwhelming repeal of the death penalty. Second, the Court should be hesitant to place New Hampshire in the anomalous position it would occupy were it to become the first and only state to execute someone under a repealed death penalty statute; the diametrically opposite approach of every other repeal state should weigh heavily in the Court’s current renewed proportionality review. Third, the Court should consider the legion of social science research explaining the ways that race likely contributed to the death sentence of a poor, Black man who did not “purposefully kill” the victim, particularly when the sentence came in the same year that a rich, white man was given a life sentence after purposefully bludgeoning someone to death with a sledgehammer alongside two others he had hired to kill the victim. Should New Hampshire nevertheless execute Mr. Addison—despite the death penalty repeal by its state Legislature, despite every other state declining to execute people under a repealed statute, and despite the likely role that race played in his sentence—the execution would be aberrational and disproportionate several times over.