New Hampshire’s highest court on Tuesday rejected Michael Addison’s bid to reopen his death sentence, holding that the state’s 2019 repeal of capital punishment does not reach a conviction entered years earlier.
Addison, now 46, remains the only person on New Hampshire’s death row after a jury sentenced him in 2008 for fatally shooting Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs in 2006. The six-page ruling keeps that sentence in place while a separate challenge continues in another court.
Justice Melissa Countway wrote the opinion. Justices Patrick Donovan and Bryan Gould concurred. The court applied the plain effective-date language of the 2019 repeal statute and declined another round of review after an earlier automatic appellate look required by state law.
Addison argued that New Hampshire’s decision to abolish the death penalty should make his sentence unconstitutional. The court disagreed. Countway wrote that the repeal reaches only people convicted on or after the law’s effective date.
Courthouse News reported the high court’s refusal to reexamine Addison’s sentence after the repeal. The justices noted the statute’s text: the repeal “shall apply to persons convicted of capital murder on or after the effective date” of the 2019 law. Because Addison’s capital murder conviction came before that date, the repeal does not apply to him.
"The petitioner was convicted of capital murder before the effective date of the act, and the repeal therefore does not apply to him,"
The court also refused further reexamination of a sentence it had already automatically reviewed once under state law. Additional reviews of the same kind, the justices said, would undercut the purpose of prioritizing and expediting mandatory appellate review in capital cases.
That posture leaves the 2008 death sentence undisturbed by this petition. It does not resolve every remaining path Addison still has in the system.
In 2006, Addison fatally shot Officer Briggs of the Manchester Police Department. In 2008, a jury sentenced him to death for capital murder. He has remained New Hampshire’s only death row inmate.
Eleven years after that sentence, the state legislature repealed capital punishment amid ethical and equity debates. Lawmakers limited the change. The statute’s effective-date clause left pre-repeal capital convictions outside the new rule. Addison’s case is the one case that language left standing.
Families of officers killed in the line of duty often press for finality when courts revisit old capital judgments, a dynamic also visible when the family of slain teen Celeste Rivas backs death penalty arguments in another high-profile murder prosecution.
New Hampshire’s repeal did not erase Addison’s judgment. Tuesday’s ruling treats the legislature’s cutoff date as controlling and declines to rewrite it from the bench.
Addison’s lawyer, Jonathan Cohen, told Courthouse News the defense still sees the repeal as fatal to the sentence.
"We continue to believe that the law compellingly supports the conclusion that in the wake of New Hampshire’s repeal of the death penalty, Mr. Addison’s death sentence cannot stand,"
Megan Byrne, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, called the outcome disappointing and framed Addison’s case as proof of broader problems. The ACLU had filed amicus briefs supporting a sentencing review and argued an execution would make New Hampshire the only state to carry out a death sentence under a repealed statute. Byrne also pointed to race and to a comparison case.
"It is extremely disappointing that the court did not take this opportunity to address the disproportionate and inequitable death sentence imposed on Mr. Addison, the only person on New Hampshire’s death row and a Black man,"
Byrne continued that New Hampshire repealed the death penalty in 2019 because it recognized the punishment as unjust, inhumane, and infected with racial bias, and that Addison’s case “puts those very problems on full display.” She said the state should not “move backward by defending a sentence under a law it has already rejected.” The ACLU-related account in the reporting also cited John Brooks, described as a wealthy white New Hampshire businessman sentenced the same year as Addison to life rather than death after beating a handyman to death with a sledgehammer.
Death penalty fights elsewhere show how quickly charging decisions and expert views can shift, including when Los Angeles prosecutors take death penalty off the table in a major stabbing case.
Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who previously served as attorney general and as lead prosecutor in Addison’s murder case, backed the court. She has said Addison should still be put to death.
"Addison’s sentence was handed down fairly and in accordance with the law by a jury of his peers, and today’s ruling by the New Hampshire Supreme Court is an important step toward ensuring justice for Officer Briggs, the Briggs family, and the men and women of the Manchester Police Department,"
Ayotte’s statement ties the ruling to justice for the slain officer, his family, and Manchester police. It treats the jury’s 2008 verdict and sentence as the lawful baseline the high court just reaffirmed.
Tuesday’s decision closes one path. It does not end the litigation. Addison still awaits a ruling on another appeal of his sentence in Merrimack County Superior Court. That pending matter could halt an execution if he prevails there. Public reporting has not detailed the filing date, the precise claims, or a current execution schedule.
Investigators and courts have already completed the conviction, the original capital sentence, and at least one mandatory appellate review. What remains is the separate superior court challenge and any further proceedings that follow from it. Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether an execution date is set.
Capital cases nationwide continue to draw scrutiny over methods and timing, including coverage of how Tennessee sets Wednesday execution for only woman on death row and related lethal-injection disputes. Last week in Tennessee, 50-year-old murder convict Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital and was left in critical condition in what was described as the second botched death-penalty attempt in that state in about six months. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.
New Hampshire’s case is different in posture. The dispute before the supreme court turned on statutory reach after repeal, not on a scheduled lethal injection. The justices answered that question by enforcing the legislature’s effective-date line.
The 2019 repeal removed capital punishment going forward. It did not, on the court’s reading, convert every prior capital judgment into a life sentence. Countway’s opinion treats the conviction date as the hinge. Addison was convicted of capital murder before the act took effect. The repeal therefore does not apply to him.
Defense counsel and the ACLU urge a broader reading grounded in fairness claims and in the state’s later rejection of the death penalty. The governor and the court majority frame the question as one of enacted text, a completed jury sentence, and respect for an earlier mandatory review already performed.
Similar fights over whether death remains available after major case developments appear when a former Kohberger defense expert reverses course and calls for death penalty arguments after missed-evidence claims.
In Addison’s matter, the supreme court refused to reopen a sentence it had already examined under the old capital framework. The justices declined to treat the later policy change as a second automatic do-over for a pre-repeal conviction.
Presidential and military capital cases can raise separate questions about method and authority, as when Trump approves Army firing squad for Nidal Hasan after a Fort Hood death sentence. New Hampshire’s ruling stays inside state statutory construction and appellate procedure.
Addison’s status is unchanged by Tuesday’s order: he is still the state’s sole death row inmate, still under a 2008 death sentence for the 2006 killing of Officer Briggs, and still pursuing the separate superior court appeal that could stop an execution. The high court has now said the 2019 repeal does not wipe that sentence away.
When a jury lawfully imposes the ultimate penalty for the murder of a police officer, courts that honor the statute as written keep faith with victims, with officers who run toward danger, and with a constitutional order that does not erase judgments every time the political winds shift.
