GOP Lawmakers Are Quietly Turning Against the Death Penalty

David Welch’s wife died on Christmas Day 2016. He doesn’t remember much of what happened that next year. But in the grips of grief, he came to a fundamental realization, he told me: The death penalty is “just morally wrong.”

Welch has served as a Republican in the New Hampshire state House for more than three decades. For most of that time, he had consistently voted to uphold the death penalty. But after his wife’s death, he came to understand that when the state executes someone, it puts another family through the intense period of mourning he went through. “There is no reason for it,” he told me. “They’re innocent.”

Though law-and-order conservatives have long championed the death penalty, New Hampshire is one of a growing number of states where Republicans like Welch are joining Democrats to push for a ban. Last week, New Hampshire became the 21st