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Handicapping New Hampshire?s first capital appeal

By cdw

via press accounts: The defense team’s objections included a litany of constitutional challenges to New Hampshire’s capital murder statute. Since the last death sentence was handed down here in 1959, state law and U.S. Supreme Court law around the death penalty have changed. Addison’s case will be the first time that New Hampshire’s justices examine the state’s statute. “There has never been an independent review of whether this death penalty statute stands up under the New Hampshire Constitution,” said Barbara Keshen, who has prosecuted and defended murder cases in the state and is now the staff lawyer at the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union and an active death penalty opponent. Keshen identified a number of questions for the court to consider before it ever reaches the details of Addison’s case, including language in the New Hampshire Constitution that describes “the true design of all punishments” as “to reform, not to exterminate mankind...continue to full post

Full post as published by Capital Defense Weekly on December 21, 2008 (boomark / email).