A bill to abolish the death penalty

A bill to abolish the death penalty. The Senate, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, voted 14 to 10, after an emotional hour long debate, to approve a bill repealing the state's death penalty. The state House of Representatives had voted the bill in March by a 28-vote margin (191-163). Although New Hampshire became the first state in over 20 years to vote to repeal the death penalty, the legislation was vetoed by Governor Jeanne Shaheen. In the weeks leading to the vote, three senators -- including the Democratic chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee, Debora Pignatelli -- changed their minds and voted to repeal the death penalty, providing the margin of victory. Senator Rick Trombley, a Democrat from Boscawen, had favored the death penalty. But Mr. Trombley became troubled by testimony before the House Judiciary Committee over the case of a man, Richard Buchanan, who was charged with the murder and rape of a 6-year-old girl but was later exonerated by DNA evidence. "If scientific evidence today shows that we're making mistake after mistake after mistake, the Legislature ought not to allow for the possibility of that mistake being made," Mr. Trombley told The Concord Monitor in an article that detailed the anguished decisions of the three senators. "The only way to do that is to abolish the death penalty." Mrs. Pignatelli had also favored the death penalty until the Legislature began holding hearings. In January, one witness, Paris Carriger, told lawmakers that he had spent 21 years on Arizona's death row, and once came within three hours of being executed, before being released. "There's something unseemly about the state being in the position of executing people," Mrs. Pignatelli finally concluded. Leo Fraser, a Republican from Pittsfield, the third senator who changed his mind, said that several factors figured in his decision, including doubts that capital punishment was a deterrent to crime, but that he was particularly struck by a letter from a woman in Guilford. "She wrote to me that she considered me her agent," Mr. Fraser told The Monitor. "'And as my agent,' she said, 'I'd be devastated if I thought you'd put someone to death.'" The bill recommended by the Judiciary Committee would have eliminate executions as a sentencing option and replace it with life in prison without parole. The last execution in New Hampshire took place in 1939; there are no outstanding death sentences.