However, the next day Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, vetoed the bill.

The New Hampshire vote comes at a time of declining support for the use of capital punishment and an expanding rift among the capitalist rulers over this issue. A Gallup poll in February showed that public support for capital punishment has reached its lowest level in more than a decade.

"After years in which legislatures reenacted death penalty statutes, expanded eligible capital crimes and hastened appeals processes, many capital punishment observers find it oddly significant that New Hampshire, which last executed a prisoner in 1939...has taken a dramatic stand," observed an article in the Washington Post.

Last January, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois admitted that it was routine for people to be improperly convicted and sentenced in the state, following revelations of frame-ups, inadequate legal representation, and actions by the police and judiciary that violated legal protections. Ryan, a Republican and a longtime proponent of the death penalty, ordered a moratorium on executions in that state.

Since 1987 Illinois authorities had freed 13 prisoners from death row because of overwhelming proof that not only were they not proven guilty, but they were in fact innocent.

This is more than the number of people executed there during that time.

Thirty-eight states impose the death penalty, and about 3,600 inmates remain on death rows nationwide, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Last year, a record 98 prisoners were executed, one-third of them in Texas. However, a growing number of inmates are being exonerated. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 87 death row prisoners have been freed since 1973.

At an April 24 hearing before the New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee. Kirk Bloodworth of Cambridge, Maryland. told the legislators that before being freed in 1993 as a result of post-trial DNA testing, he spent nearly a decade in prison on murder and rape charges.

Another witness, Paris Carriger, testified a few months earlier that he was on Arizona's death row for 21 years, and came within three hours of being executed before being released.

According to an article in the New York Times, "death penalty opponents in the New Hampshire Legislature appear unlikely to be able to muster the two-thirds vote in both houses necessary to override the governor's veto."  
 
 
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