Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant
Dublin Core
Title
Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant
Subject
Capital punishment
Description
The case of Gordon Perry is examined. It is considered by Michael Mello to be a case highly important to those opposing the death penalty in New Hampshire.
Creator
Mello, Michael
Source
Strohmeyer, Sarah. “Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant.” Sunday Valley News, September 28, 1997.
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1997-08-28
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
3 JPGs 300 DPI
Language
English
Coverage
Lebanon, NH
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
September 28, 1997
Sunday Valley News
Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant
By SARAH STROHMEYER
Valley News Staff Writer
LEBANON — For decades, foes of capital punishment have rested comfortably in New Hampshire knowing that the state’s last execution took place 58 years ago and that the likelihood of another one in their lifetimes seemed distant.
But the alarm went off last month when Gordon Perry, 22, allegedly discharged his .38 caliber Taurus into the side of Epson Officer Jeremy Charron as he checked Perry’s car early on Aug. 24. Charron, who had just returned from serving as a pallbearer at the funeral of a New Hampshire trooper killed in a gun battle in the North Country, died on the way to the hospital.
There have been other murders recently that might have met the narrow criteria for capital punishment in the Granite State, but for one reason or another the attorney general has not sought that penalty. That is not the situation with Perry’s case, which has been described by legal experts as solidly within the parameters of a capital crime.
This time, the New Hampshire Attorney General has pledged to seek Perry’s execution. And now, death penalty foes are rushing to organize a movement to prevent that and other future executions — even though they already may be too late.
“Basically it will take us a long time to gear up an organized effort,” said Arnold Alpert, New Hampshire Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee. “In states like Texas and Florida, where executions have been taking place, (opponents) are organized about it. Or in states like Pennsylvania, where there is no death penalty, they have an active movement. But we’re in sort of this intermediate place.”
One of the state’s more vocal opponents of capital punishment is Mark Larsen, a Lebanon lawyer, an unsuccessful candidate for Grafton County Attorney, and perhaps a future leader of the state’s anti-death penalty movement.
Larsen said he decided to speak up months ago, following Gov. Jeanne Shaheen’s announcement during her campaign last fall that she intended to expand the death penalty statute to apply to those who murder during the commission of other specific felonies, especially when children are the victims. As a start, Larsen sent the governor a book on the death penalty written by former California governor E.G. “Pat" Brown.
Last spring, Shaheen renewed her campaign pledge when a bill was introduced to the state legislature advocating the death penalty for people who murder children or crime witnesses.
Now that Perry has been charged with a capital crime, the issue has taken on even greater intensity, Larsen said.
“Certainly, with the Charron killing, this has got to ring into focus the question of the death penalty,” said Larsen. “I certainly intend to join with like-minded people to, number one, try to convince the governor that she doesn’t want to go down that path. My plan is to join with others.
See Death — Page A6
[Bold Enlarged Quotation] “I certainly intend to join with like-minded people to … try to convince the governor that she doesn’t want to go down that path.”
Mark Larsen
Lawyer
Continued from page A1
This is not the way we want to go, morally or ethically.”
He and other observers have noted a striking convergence of factors over several years that contribute to the sense of urgency. They include changes in New Hampshire law that bring the state’s capital punishment statute in line with U.S. Supreme Court rulings, thereby making it tough to challenge in court; and a switch from hanging to lethal injection as the preferred method of execution, with the intent of making executions more politically palatable.
Those changes took place after the state reinstituted capital punishment in 1977. And they seem to have caught death penalty opponents off guard.
“In New Hampshire, the movement to reinstate capital punishment has been very methodical and without … public discussion,” said David Lamarre-Vincent, executive secretary of the New Hampshire Council of Churches. “I recall House and Senate hearings on incremental steps, and there was little press coverage and public interest.”
The Rev. John McHugh, director of Aquinas House at the Catholic Student Center at Dartmouth College, testified in legislative hearings about the death penalty when it was reinstated in the ’77. He said he still is opposed to it, as is the Catholic Church, but does not have immediate plans to speak against it again. “I wasn’t aware that there was an imminent need,” he said.
McHugh’s perception is not uncommon. Sarah Putnam is a Quaker, secretary of the local Society of Friends and an opponent of the death penalty. More recently, though, she had been immersed in other causes, such as protesting the launching of a satellite that will carry nuclear material into outer space.
“As soon as the governor came into office, we wrote her a letter of support stating again our stand against capital punishment,” said Putnam, referring to her local Society of Friends. “But that was it. We haven’t been real active on this issue recently. … I wasn’t aware that there was even this momentum” about the death penalty.
Lamarre-Vincent said a sense of urgency has been missing over the past decade or more in part because it has looked like New Hampshire’s narrowly defined capital punishment statute might never be imposed. He said he knows there is support for his organization’s anti-death-penalty stance because the council of churches got a heavy response to a pamphlet on the death penalty published just about the time of the Charron Shooting.
“It’s a coincidence,” Lamarre-Vincent said. His group had begun work on the publication two years ago after it noticed a “gradual move toward an acceptance of the death penalty” in New Hampshire.
Now the council or churches is trying to assemble a task force of theologians, lawyers and business people who are opposed to the death penalty; Lamarre-Vincent said he is searching for people willing to speak out. He said Larsen is one of the few he’s found so far who does not mind sticking his neck out.
“What we want to do is create a forum for a renewed public discussion of this issue,” he said. “We want to begin to put together, hopefully, a task force. … I have been trying to find people willing to speak out on the issue. I just haven’t seen a lot of other people speaking out publicly.”
New Hampshire has never been a hang-’em-high state. For the first 100 years of its settlement, no execution took place even though neighbors in Massachusetts seemed to be crazy for the public entertainment, at times hanging up to 16 people in one day.
Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenney, teenage girls, were hauled through the streets of Portsmouth on Dec. 27, 1739, and hanged in such a way that they died by slow strangulation. They had been convicted of drowning a child whose body was never found.
The last execution took place on July 14, 1939, in the state prison in Concord. Howard Long was hanged for “a sexual slaying” in Laconia, according to a state librarian.
In between, there was the 1796 hanging of Thomas Powers (some records use the name Palmer) in Haverhill for a murder committed in Lebanon.
Since 1939, three people have spent time on death row. One man was sentenced to death in June 1949, but he committed suicide the following year. The other two were Rhode Island men who had killed a manufacturer in Nashua, but they were never hanged because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.
That Supreme Court ruling, in Furman vs. Georgia, also left a door open for the reinstatement of capital punishment by each state. Many states then rewrote their statues to address the high court’s concerns that the death penalty was too often targeting minorities and the indigent. Today 39 states have death penalty statutes.
Debate about capital punishment in New Hampshire resumed in 1985, when then Attorney General Steven Merrill proposed changing the method of execution from hanging to lethal injection. At the time, Mississippi was the only other state that hanged its prisoners. Two years later, Gov. John Sununu signed the lethal injection bill into law.
In 1990, the law was tinkered with again, and it is that revised version that is on the books now. To impose the death penalty, the state must have a case that falls into one of five specific categories: the killing of an on-duty law enforcement officer, the killing of someone during a kidnapping; the hiring of another person to kill, killing after being sentenced to life in prison without parole, and killing while committing or attempting to commit aggravated felonious sexual assault.
That New Hampshire has not expanded its capital punishment statute to include “felony murders” — murders committed during other felony crimes — makes it a tougher law to challenge on a constitutional basis, according to Vermont Law School professor Mike Mello, a nationally recognized expert on the death penalty — and an opponent of it.
“The states that have crafted narrow death penalty statutes have survived” constitutional challenges, he said, noting that New Hampshire modeled its statute after laws adopted in other states that had already passed “constitutional muster.”
In New Hampshire, a jury must find unanimously, after a special sentencing hearing, that the murderer purposely killed the victim or victims, or purposely engaged in behavior that resulted in death. If the jury does that, then it must find that eight aggravating factors outweigh 10 mitigating factors in order to impose the death penalty. That vote must be unanimous, too.
In the case of Perry, who already had a serious criminal record when Charron was killed, the key aggravating factor might be that he was trying to avoid or prevent a lawful arrest.
And that is what may make the Perry case an urgent one for death penalty foes. “We’re following this case pretty closely in my capital punishment seminar,” said Mello. “Absolutely, this is the case I have been dreading would come along in New Hampshire.”
Sunday Valley News
Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant
By SARAH STROHMEYER
Valley News Staff Writer
LEBANON — For decades, foes of capital punishment have rested comfortably in New Hampshire knowing that the state’s last execution took place 58 years ago and that the likelihood of another one in their lifetimes seemed distant.
But the alarm went off last month when Gordon Perry, 22, allegedly discharged his .38 caliber Taurus into the side of Epson Officer Jeremy Charron as he checked Perry’s car early on Aug. 24. Charron, who had just returned from serving as a pallbearer at the funeral of a New Hampshire trooper killed in a gun battle in the North Country, died on the way to the hospital.
There have been other murders recently that might have met the narrow criteria for capital punishment in the Granite State, but for one reason or another the attorney general has not sought that penalty. That is not the situation with Perry’s case, which has been described by legal experts as solidly within the parameters of a capital crime.
This time, the New Hampshire Attorney General has pledged to seek Perry’s execution. And now, death penalty foes are rushing to organize a movement to prevent that and other future executions — even though they already may be too late.
“Basically it will take us a long time to gear up an organized effort,” said Arnold Alpert, New Hampshire Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee. “In states like Texas and Florida, where executions have been taking place, (opponents) are organized about it. Or in states like Pennsylvania, where there is no death penalty, they have an active movement. But we’re in sort of this intermediate place.”
One of the state’s more vocal opponents of capital punishment is Mark Larsen, a Lebanon lawyer, an unsuccessful candidate for Grafton County Attorney, and perhaps a future leader of the state’s anti-death penalty movement.
Larsen said he decided to speak up months ago, following Gov. Jeanne Shaheen’s announcement during her campaign last fall that she intended to expand the death penalty statute to apply to those who murder during the commission of other specific felonies, especially when children are the victims. As a start, Larsen sent the governor a book on the death penalty written by former California governor E.G. “Pat" Brown.
Last spring, Shaheen renewed her campaign pledge when a bill was introduced to the state legislature advocating the death penalty for people who murder children or crime witnesses.
Now that Perry has been charged with a capital crime, the issue has taken on even greater intensity, Larsen said.
“Certainly, with the Charron killing, this has got to ring into focus the question of the death penalty,” said Larsen. “I certainly intend to join with like-minded people to, number one, try to convince the governor that she doesn’t want to go down that path. My plan is to join with others.
See Death — Page A6
[Bold Enlarged Quotation] “I certainly intend to join with like-minded people to … try to convince the governor that she doesn’t want to go down that path.”
Mark Larsen
Lawyer
Continued from page A1
This is not the way we want to go, morally or ethically.”
He and other observers have noted a striking convergence of factors over several years that contribute to the sense of urgency. They include changes in New Hampshire law that bring the state’s capital punishment statute in line with U.S. Supreme Court rulings, thereby making it tough to challenge in court; and a switch from hanging to lethal injection as the preferred method of execution, with the intent of making executions more politically palatable.
Those changes took place after the state reinstituted capital punishment in 1977. And they seem to have caught death penalty opponents off guard.
“In New Hampshire, the movement to reinstate capital punishment has been very methodical and without … public discussion,” said David Lamarre-Vincent, executive secretary of the New Hampshire Council of Churches. “I recall House and Senate hearings on incremental steps, and there was little press coverage and public interest.”
The Rev. John McHugh, director of Aquinas House at the Catholic Student Center at Dartmouth College, testified in legislative hearings about the death penalty when it was reinstated in the ’77. He said he still is opposed to it, as is the Catholic Church, but does not have immediate plans to speak against it again. “I wasn’t aware that there was an imminent need,” he said.
McHugh’s perception is not uncommon. Sarah Putnam is a Quaker, secretary of the local Society of Friends and an opponent of the death penalty. More recently, though, she had been immersed in other causes, such as protesting the launching of a satellite that will carry nuclear material into outer space.
“As soon as the governor came into office, we wrote her a letter of support stating again our stand against capital punishment,” said Putnam, referring to her local Society of Friends. “But that was it. We haven’t been real active on this issue recently. … I wasn’t aware that there was even this momentum” about the death penalty.
Lamarre-Vincent said a sense of urgency has been missing over the past decade or more in part because it has looked like New Hampshire’s narrowly defined capital punishment statute might never be imposed. He said he knows there is support for his organization’s anti-death-penalty stance because the council of churches got a heavy response to a pamphlet on the death penalty published just about the time of the Charron Shooting.
“It’s a coincidence,” Lamarre-Vincent said. His group had begun work on the publication two years ago after it noticed a “gradual move toward an acceptance of the death penalty” in New Hampshire.
Now the council or churches is trying to assemble a task force of theologians, lawyers and business people who are opposed to the death penalty; Lamarre-Vincent said he is searching for people willing to speak out. He said Larsen is one of the few he’s found so far who does not mind sticking his neck out.
“What we want to do is create a forum for a renewed public discussion of this issue,” he said. “We want to begin to put together, hopefully, a task force. … I have been trying to find people willing to speak out on the issue. I just haven’t seen a lot of other people speaking out publicly.”
New Hampshire has never been a hang-’em-high state. For the first 100 years of its settlement, no execution took place even though neighbors in Massachusetts seemed to be crazy for the public entertainment, at times hanging up to 16 people in one day.
Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenney, teenage girls, were hauled through the streets of Portsmouth on Dec. 27, 1739, and hanged in such a way that they died by slow strangulation. They had been convicted of drowning a child whose body was never found.
The last execution took place on July 14, 1939, in the state prison in Concord. Howard Long was hanged for “a sexual slaying” in Laconia, according to a state librarian.
In between, there was the 1796 hanging of Thomas Powers (some records use the name Palmer) in Haverhill for a murder committed in Lebanon.
Since 1939, three people have spent time on death row. One man was sentenced to death in June 1949, but he committed suicide the following year. The other two were Rhode Island men who had killed a manufacturer in Nashua, but they were never hanged because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.
That Supreme Court ruling, in Furman vs. Georgia, also left a door open for the reinstatement of capital punishment by each state. Many states then rewrote their statues to address the high court’s concerns that the death penalty was too often targeting minorities and the indigent. Today 39 states have death penalty statutes.
Debate about capital punishment in New Hampshire resumed in 1985, when then Attorney General Steven Merrill proposed changing the method of execution from hanging to lethal injection. At the time, Mississippi was the only other state that hanged its prisoners. Two years later, Gov. John Sununu signed the lethal injection bill into law.
In 1990, the law was tinkered with again, and it is that revised version that is on the books now. To impose the death penalty, the state must have a case that falls into one of five specific categories: the killing of an on-duty law enforcement officer, the killing of someone during a kidnapping; the hiring of another person to kill, killing after being sentenced to life in prison without parole, and killing while committing or attempting to commit aggravated felonious sexual assault.
That New Hampshire has not expanded its capital punishment statute to include “felony murders” — murders committed during other felony crimes — makes it a tougher law to challenge on a constitutional basis, according to Vermont Law School professor Mike Mello, a nationally recognized expert on the death penalty — and an opponent of it.
“The states that have crafted narrow death penalty statutes have survived” constitutional challenges, he said, noting that New Hampshire modeled its statute after laws adopted in other states that had already passed “constitutional muster.”
In New Hampshire, a jury must find unanimously, after a special sentencing hearing, that the murderer purposely killed the victim or victims, or purposely engaged in behavior that resulted in death. If the jury does that, then it must find that eight aggravating factors outweigh 10 mitigating factors in order to impose the death penalty. That vote must be unanimous, too.
In the case of Perry, who already had a serious criminal record when Charron was killed, the key aggravating factor might be that he was trying to avoid or prevent a lawful arrest.
And that is what may make the Perry case an urgent one for death penalty foes. “We’re following this case pretty closely in my capital punishment seminar,” said Mello. “Absolutely, this is the case I have been dreading would come along in New Hampshire.”
Original Format
Newspaper
Vol. No./Issue No.
Vol. 46, issue 112
Contributor of the Digital Item
Curran, Ruth
Student Editor of the Digital Item
Van Doren, Jamie
Files
Citation
Mello, Michael, “Death Penalty Foes Have Been Dormant,” HIST299, accessed July 4, 2024, http://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/277.