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Death Penalty Forum
On April 15, 2008, Pierce Law Review and the Social Justice Institute hosted a panel discussion on the death penalty at Franklin Pierce Law Center. This panel discussion coincided with Pierce Law Review’s publication of a special death penalty issue, with articles written by experts in the field, law professors and a Pierce Law student.
The subject of the panel discussion was “Current Issues of the Death Penalty in New Hampshire” and the panel members included Peter Beeson, Renny Cushing, Barbara Keshen, John Kissinger, Alan Rogers and Andru Volinsky.
Peter Beeson, an attorney at Devine Millimet in New Hampshire, used to be the chief of the criminal bureau in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office.
Renny Cushing, the founder and Executive Director of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, has testified before the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures on the death penalty and is very active in the campaign to end the death penalty in New Hampshire.
Barbara Keshen, a staff attorney at the NH Civil Liberties Union and adjunct professor at Pierce Law, has a lot of experience with the death penalty in New Hampshire. While working at the New Hampshire Public Defender, she helped defend a client in a capital case, successfully obtaining a plea bargain in that case. Prior to that, Keshen worked at the Criminal Justice Bureau of the NH Attorney General’s Office.
John Kissinger, an attorney at Nelson, Kinder, Mosseau & Saturley in Manchester, New Hampshire, was also defending a capital case in Georgia at the time of this panel discussion. Prior to joining NKM&S, Kissinger was a homicide prosecutor in the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office for more than five years. During that time, he handled several high profile murder cases for the State of New Hampshire.
Alan Rogers, a Professor of History at Boston College, has written extensively on the death penalty, particularly on the history of the death penalty in Massachusetts. He wrote an article featured in Pierce Law Review’s upcoming special death penalty issue and is also the author of the book: Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts.
Andru Volinsky, an attorney at Bernstein Shur in Manchester, New Hampshire, was also defending a pro bono capital case in Georgia at the time of this panel discussion. Volinsky has previously worked with the NH Public Defender and argued and won the U.S. Supreme Court case, Gray v. Mississippi, a death penalty case in 1987.
The panel discussion was moderated by Ralph Jimenez. Ralph Jimenez is the founder of the Concord basketball league named in honor of the late Pierce Law professor Bruce Friedman. He is in his third decade of writing about New Hampshire for the Concord Monitor and the Boston Globe and at the time of this panel discussion was serving his second stint as the Monitor's editorial page editor. He was named the 2007 editorial writer of the year by the New Hampshire Press Association.
Topics covered at this panel discussion included: current capital litigation in New Hampshire, legislative efforts in NH dealing with the death penalty, comparing death penalty law and practice in NH to other states and how current legislative efforts and court cases in other states have impacted the death penalty debate in New Hampshire.
