U.S.

New Hampshire Retains Death Penalty

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 18, 2000 / 4:24 PM EDT / CBS

New Hampshire's House on Tuesday failed to override the governor's veto of a bill that would have repealed the state's death penalty.

The repeal measure was somewhat symbolic, since New Hampshire hasn't executed anyone since 1939. The state had the nation's lowest murder rate in 1998, has no capital murder trials pending, and has no one on death row.

Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, considers the death penalty "the only appropriate penalty" in some cases.

The House voted 194-148 in the effort to override Shaheen's veto of the repeal, 34 votes shy of two-thirds of those voting.

The only legislators who spoke favored the override. "This last century has been a century of killing. Are we going to say this century is going to be a century of civility?" said Rep. Anthony DiFruscia.

"You don't have any millionaires sitting on death row. Name one," said DiFruscia, a Republican.

The original repeal legislation was passed 191-163 by the House in March. The Senate passed it in May on a vote of 14-10, a tally that was two votes shy of two-thirds.

New Hampshire's death penalty applies only to a short list of crimes, including murder of a law enforcement officer, murder for hire, and murder during a rape or attempted rape. The state has averaged 21 homicides a year in the past decade, most of which are not punishable by death.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized capital punishment in 1976, only one other state, Nebraska, has voted to repeal a death-penalty statute. That bill, which passed in 1979, also was vetoed.

Thirty-seven states have the death penalty; 13 do not.

The death penalty has been under intense scrutiny this year in many states. In January, Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois suspended all executions pending a task force study. The decision followed the release of 13 death row inmates deemed wrongly or unfairly convicted.

Executions in Texas, where more men have been put to death than in any other state in recent years, also have been widely discussed this year, in part because its governor, George W. Bush, is running for president.

In Richmond, Va., on Monday, Gov. Jim Gilmore rejected a request that he declare a moratorium on executions and order a study on whether the Virginia death penalty is imposed fairly.

The request came from the General Assembly's Black Caucus. The group's chairman, Delegate Jerrauld C. Jones, called it "a moral imperative."

The proposal was in response to a Columbia University report that found that fewer than one in five death penalty cases are reversed on appeal in Virginia, a lower rate than anywhere else in the country.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 19 executions are scheduled through the beginning of October 2000. On Aug. 5, the federal goverment is due to carry out its first execution in 37 years when it puts Juan Raul Garza to death.