Lex Loci: a Survey of New Hampshire Supreme Court Decisions

• Jurisdiction: New Hampshire,United States
• Citation: Vol. 49 No. 2 Pg. 0056
• Publication year: 2008
• Pages: 0056
• Year: 2008
• topic: Charity and Non-Profit Law,Constitutional Law,Civil Procedure

New Hampshire Bar Journal 2008.

2008 Autumn, Pg. 56. LEX LOCI: A Survey of New Hampshire Supreme Court Decisions

New Hampshire Bar Journal
Volume 49, No. 2
Autumn 2008

LEX LOCI: A Survey of New Hampshire Supreme Court Decisions

By Attorney Charles A. DeGrandpre(fn1)

Opinion of the Justices (Voting Age in Primaries), opinion issued May 19, 2008, was the Supreme Court's advisory opinion response to the request of the House of Representatives for the Court's opinion on a proposed Senate bill which would allow 17 year olds to vote in a primary election if they would be 18 years of age at the time of the next general election. The Court considered whether the proposed bill violated two parts of the New Hampshire Constitution, namely, Part 1, Article 28-a prohibiting unfunded legislative mandates for programs operated by municipalities, and Part 1, Article 11 establishing the age for voting in New Hampshire at the age of 18.

The unanimous Court spent little time finding that the provision did not violate the unfunded mandate constitutional provision and devoted most of its opinion to the question of the constitutional age provision. It looked at the legislative history of the constitutional provision which dated back to 1784 and was most recently amended in 1976. The Court examined closely the language of the age provision which states that "every inhabitant of the state of 18 years of age and upwards shall have an equal right to vote in any election." (Emphasis added.) The Court found that this language was all inclusive and rejected the arguments of the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and the President of the New Hampshire Senate to the contrary, finding that "the argument of the Speaker and Senate President would prevail only if a primary election is not an 'election' within the meaning of Part 1, Article 11." The Court concluded that "this [constitutional] phrase refers to all elections, including primary elections." Despite all attempts to increase citizen participation in elections, to the author, this opinion follows the trend in many other states to make it harder, not easier, for a citizen to vote.

In a first degree murder case, State v. Sullivan, opinion issued April 18, 2008, the Court had before it the appeal of a teenage defendant who, with his abettor [the teenage daughter of the murder victim] had made four failed attempts to take the victim's life, finally succeeding the fifth time. The failed attempts on the mother (who opposed the continuation of her daughter's and the defendant's Internet-initiated romance) included poisoning her coffee cream and attempting to blow up her home by igniting its oil tank. They finally succeeded in doing her in by clubbing her with a baseball bat and then stabbing her to death. This was not only the proverbial gang who couldn't shoot straight, but they shot at each other, each separately confessing to the crime and implicating the other. They were not too swift, since each ended up individually confessing to the murder after voluntarily returning, within hours, to the scene of the crime while it was still under it's initial police investigation.

Despite the defendant's almost incomprehensible and certainly foolish post-crime behavior, he won reprieve from his jury conviction due to the trial court's (Justice Hicks before his elevation to the Supreme Court) error in replacing a juror during deliberations, over the defendant's objections. The decision offers a very good look at the delicate task that a trial judge has when there is an allegation of misconduct by a juror after jury deliberations have begun. There was a lot of cause for the trial court's impatience and ultimate removal of the juror, a retired state legislator who had been publicly reprimanded about his behavior while in office by the attorney general's office. The juror was troublesome from the start, when, after initial voir dire by the court, he came to the bench and inexplicably asked the judge whether he could serve as a juror as he was not a peer of the defendant because he did...