via press accounts:

The defense team’s objections included a litany of constitutional challenges to New Hampshire’s capital murder statute. Since the last death sentence was handed down here in 1959, state law and U.S. Supreme Court law around the death penalty have changed. Addison’s case will be the first time that New Hampshire’s justices examine the state’s statute.

“There has never been an independent review of whether this death penalty statute stands up under the New Hampshire Constitution,” said Barbara Keshen, who has prosecuted and defended murder cases in the state and is now the staff lawyer at the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union and an active death penalty opponent.

Keshen identified a number of questions for the court to consider before it ever reaches the details of Addison’s case, including language in the New Hampshire Constitution that describes “the true design of all punishments” as “to reform, not to exterminate mankind.”

Keshen also said that the court could find that the death penalty does not square with “evolving standards of decency.”

Addison’s lawyers have raised many more constitutional challenges, saying the law is unfair because it disproportionately affects black defendants, punishes killings that are not premeditated, permits victim impact evidence that stirs jurors’ emotions and that lethal injection – the execution method recommended by the statute – is cruel.

Addison’s lawyers also plan to appeal the case on issues particular to Addison’s trial. In an e-mail yesterday, Guerriero said that the appeal will focus on four issues:

• The defense plans to appeal Addison’s convictions in three other incidents close to the murder that prosecutors have characterized as a crime spree. Guerriero said that prosecutors were improperly allowed to tell jurors in those cases that Addison was facing a capital murder charge. After his convictions for those crimes – two armed robberies and a domestic shooting – jurors were asked to consider the guilty verdicts as reasons why Addison deserved death.

• The defense asked the court repeatedly to move the case out of Manchester and into a different county court, citing blanket media coverage of the case and the emotional atmosphere surrounding the killing in the city. Addison’s lawyers argued that jurors would have preconceived notions about the case and might have trouble facing their neighbors if they did not select a death sentence. Judge Kathleen McGuire rejected the motions, and a pretrial appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court was unsuccessful.

• The defense unsuccessfully asked McGuire to tell the jury that it must find the death penalty was necessary “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

• The defense asked to tell jurors about other murder cases, where capital punishment was not imposed, as a means of arguing that a death sentence would be disproportionate. McGuire said such comparisons were the job of the Supreme Court, not the jury.

“My sense is that they’re doing exactly what very capable defense attorneys are supposed to be doing in capital cases,” said Charles Putnam, a professor at UNH and co-director of the university’s Justiceworks study group. “They’re finding issues that they want to articulate, they’re focusing on those, and they’re finding ways to return to them.”