New Hampshire Supreme Court denies death row inmate’s latest appeal

Seven years after repealing the death penalty, New Hampshire has one inmate on death row. On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court declined to intervene in his case, citing statutory authority.

Michael Addison has been in prison for roughly 20 years for fatally shooting Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs in 2006. In 2008, a jury sentenced him to death. He was the last person to receive the death penalty before state lawmakers abolished it in 2019. However, the Legislature made the bill forward-looking, meaning that existing sentences like Addison’s could still be carried out.

Addison has spent the past decade and a half appealing his sentence with the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent support. Addison’s attorneys and the ACLU of New Hampshire argued that the state can’t execute him while it was forbidden by law from executing everyone else and that racial bias against Addison, who is Black, affected his sentence. The ACLU of New Hampshire compared him, in a 2025 “friend of the court” brief, to two other convicted murderers in New Hampshire — John Brooks in 2006 and Gordon Perry in 1998 — in which the courts found a stronger intent to kill but a jury sentenced the defendant to life in prison instead of death. They asked the court to review the proportionality of the case.

However, on Tuesday, the court declined to do so because it had already reviewed the proportionality of the case in 2015, at which point it determined that Addison’s sentence was “neither excessive nor disproportionate.” Justices argued that the state Legislature has authority over how death penalties are reviewed, and the Legislature did not give them the authority to review it again.

“If the legislature intended to provide successive comparative proportionality reviews for defendants convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death prior to the effective date of the act repealing the death penalty,” Justice Melissa Countway wrote in her opinion dismissing the appeal, “it could have included that in the legislation, but it did not.”

Gov. Kelly Ayotte, the former attorney general who prosecuted Addison’s case and has publicly called to revive the death penalty, celebrated the court’s decision.

“Michael Addison should face the death penalty for murdering Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs in cold blood nearly 20 years ago,” Ayotte said in a statement. “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.”