Nearly two decades after Michael Addison gunned down Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has agreed to hear Addison’s latest appeal — one that could determine whether he remains the state’s lone death row inmate.
Addison, now 45, was convicted of capital murder in 2008 and sentenced to death for the October 2006 killing of Briggs. He has exhausted multiple rounds of appeals, with the state’s high court repeatedly upholding both his conviction and his sentence.
But in 2019, the legislature abolished the death penalty in New Hampshire, making Addison’s case a unique test of how far the repeal extends.
Addison filed a petition earlier this year asking the Supreme Court to lift his death sentence, arguing that executing him now would be “unjust” because the state has already determined the punishment is excessive.
“With its legislative repeal of the death penalty on May 23, 2019, New Hampshire concluded that the death penalty is an excessive and disproportionate punishment for any crime or defendant,” Addison’s petition states. “This profound shift in community values against the death penalty provides ‘special and important reasons’ for this Court’s review.”
The 2019 law, however, included an explicit carve-out: it did not apply retroactively to those already on death row. At the time, that meant only one man — Michael Addison.
His attorneys have until Oct. 15 to file briefs with the court. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office will respond a month later.
Addison and his partner in crime, Antoine Bell-Rodgers, had pulled off three violent armed robberies in the days before Briggs was murdered. On Oct. 16, 2006, Briggs and fellow Manchester Police Officer John Breckenridge responded to a report of a fight at the home of Bell-Rodgers and Addison.
The two men allegedly tried to leave when they saw the officers. Briggs ordered them to stop. Bell-Rodgers did, but Addison kept walking away. When Briggs again ordered him to stop, Addison turned around and shot Briggs in the head. Briggs, at that point, hadn’t unholstered his pistol. Addison fled the state and was later caught in Dorchester, Mass.
Bell-Rodgers is currently serving a 60-year-to-life sentence for his role.
Briggs left behind his wife, Laura, and two sons, Brian and Mitchell. In 2019, Mitchell Briggs graduated from the New Hampshire Police Standards and Training Academy and followed his father into the law enforcement ranks.
The case has loomed large over the state’s decades-long debate about the death penalty. New Hampshire has not executed anyone since 1939. But Addison’s sentence has remained a symbol for both supporters and opponents of capital punishment.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte was the state’s attorney general at the time, and she pursued the death penalty against Addison. She later testified against repeal efforts in 2019, warning that a repeal would inevitably lead to pressure to spare Addison.
“If we repeal the death penalty, make no mistake, Michael Addison will not get the penalty for having murdered Officer Briggs,” Ayotte said then.
Supporters of repeal argue that executing Addison now would be inconsistent with the state’s values and unfairly singles him out as the only person still subject to a punishment the legislature has abolished.
New Hampshire isn’t the only state to abolish its death penalty prospectively, as opposed to proactively. But in every other state that’s ended capital punishment this century, death row inmates had their sentences commuted.
In Virginia, the most recent state to end the death penalty, the law commuted the two capital killers’ sentences to life in prison with no chance of parole.
New Mexico abolished its death penalty in 2009, and its two death row inmates appealed their sentences as a result. In 2019, the state’s highest court ruled they could not be executed and ordered the lower courts to re-sentence them.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court’s decision to take up Addison’s petition does not mean his sentence will be overturned. But it sets the stage for a historic ruling that could decide whether New Hampshire’s death penalty — already off the books — is finally gone in practice as well.
