Attorneys for the only person on death row in New England went before New Hampshire’s highest court on Thursday to once again plead for his life, arguing his execution would be unjust because the state no longer allows capital punishment for anyone else.
Michael K. Addison, now 46, was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing Manchester police officer Michael L. Briggs in 2006. The New Hampshire Supreme Court reaffirmed his sentence in 2015, ruling that the death penalty was “neither excessive nor disproportionate” in these circumstances.
But in 2019, New Hampshire lawmakers abolished capital punishment for all future crimes, mustering bipartisan support to override a veto from Republican Governor Chris Sununu. In theory, the change in the law left Addison’s sentence fully intact. In effect, however, his lawyers argue the change makes his sentence an intolerable outlier.
Michael Wiseman and his colleagues argued Addison’s punishment is now an aberration that the state Supreme Court must reject, since nobody else can be sentenced to death in New Hampshire for similar or even worse crimes.
Wiseman told the justices during oral arguments Thursday that no one has been executed anywhere in the United States under a death penalty statute that had been repealed.
“This court should not be the first to allow that to happen,” he said.
The state attorney general’s office urged the court to dismiss Addison’s petition on technical grounds, saying the court already reviewed the proportionality of his sentence in 2015, as required by state law, and nothing warrants reopening that review.
Assistant Attorney General Audriana Mekula told the justices Thursday that if they decide to conduct another proportionality review, they should reaffirm Addison’s death sentence based on similar cases in other states.
Besides, Mekula said, just because New Hampshire lawmakers eliminated capital punishment in 2019 doesn’t mean they won’t reinstate it in the future.
“It’s entirely possible that the death penalty comes back,” she said.
Some state lawmakers did push to revive capital punishment for certain offenses in New Hampshire after the Supreme Court agreed last fall to hear arguments on Addison’s petition. Republicans introduced several different proposals on the topic, but the GOP-controlled New Hampshire House rejected all of them in February after hearing significant pushback.
Republican Representative Terry Roy wrote in a committee report that the “overwhelming majority” of Granite Staters don’t want the death penalty “under any circumstances.”
Governor Kelly Ayotte, a first-term Republican who is up for reelection this fall, had expressed support for reinstituting the death penalty in some form, though she didn’t comment publicly on the details of any particular proposal.
Ayotte was the attorney general who oversaw Addison’s prosecution. The tough-on-crime messaging of her 2024 gubernatorial campaign included a TV ad reminding voters that she had been the former prosecutor who “put a cop killer on death row.”
Ayotte had warned lawmakers in 2019 that doing away with the death penalty would result in Addison’s sentence being commuted to life in prison without parole. In 2025, she said such an outcome would amount to “a grave injustice” and an insult to the Briggs family and law enforcement more broadly. She called Addison “a career criminal” who killed Briggs “in cold blood.”
Briggs was a 35-year-old military veteran and married father of two working as a Manchester police officer when he responded early on Oct. 16, 2006, to a domestic disturbance involving reports of gunfire. That’s when Addison, a 26-year-old with convictions in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, fatally shot him before fleeing to his grandmother’s home in Dorchester, where he was arrested hours later.
Briggs was remembered as quiet, direct, funny, and brave. His funeral procession stretched on for miles, and his murder generated a lasting sense of anger in New Hampshire. One of his sons, Mitchell Briggs, grew up to pursue a career in law enforcement, including serving recently as the police chief in Grafton, N.H., a small town about 60 miles northwest of Manchester.
Mitchell Briggs said last fall he still supports Addison’s sentence and would support reinstituting the death penalty for “a select few heinous crimes.”
The recent effort to reinstate the death penalty in New Hampshire came as President Trump touted capital punishment as “the ultimate deterrent.” Meanwhile, the number of executions carried out nationwide increased significantly last year, especially in Florida.
There were 47 executions in 2025, nearly twice as many as there had been in 2024, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. That said, the recent uptick follows a longer-term trend in the opposite direction, since the number of executions peaked at 98 in 1999.
New Hampshire, which hasn’t executed anyone since 1939, was the last state in New England to abolish its death penalty. Since then, three other states elsewhere in the country — Colorado, Virginia, and Washington — have done likewise. Although 27 states still have capital punishment on the books, four have paused executions.
A group of legal scholars represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire noted in a court filing that the highest state courts in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Oregon have confronted questions around the legality of executions after a death penalty’s elimination.
“States that repeal never execute a person sentenced to die under the repealed statute,” they wrote, urging the justices to reject Addison’s sentence.
In Connecticut, where 11 men were on death row when the state abolished its death penalty in 2012, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled they were entitled to resentencing. In the end, they were all given life in prison.
All five justices on the New Hampshire Supreme Court were appointed by either Sununu or Ayotte. The three who heard oral arguments in Addison’s case on Thursday were Patrick E. Donovan, Melissa B. Countway, and Bryan K. Gould. The other two, Chief Justice Gordon J. MacDonald and Daniel E. Will, did not participate.
Even if this current petition proves to be unpersuasive, Addison’s attorneys said he still has other avenues to seek relief. Those include a pending case that argues his death sentence is unconstitutional.
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.