Howard Altschiller haltschiller@seacoastonline.com @HowardSMG

Mike Farrell is best known for playing Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on the smash hit television series M*A*S*H, opposite Alan Alda from 1975 to 1983.

On Friday, March 3, Farrell spoke in Concord about his lesser known work as a death penalty abolitionist.

In a keynote address to the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Farrell called capital punishment the prime example of societys failure, the ultimate insult to human value.

Farrell was introduced by Barbara Keshen, a former public defender, assistant attorney general and lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of NH.

Keshen noted that New Hampshire has not executed anyone since 1939. Michael Addison, convicted of the capital murder of Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs in 2006, is the states lone death row inmate. He remains alive pending his appeals in federal court.

New Hampshire has come close to abolishing the death penalty three times, Keshen said. In 2000, repeal was passed by the Legislature and vetoed by Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. In 2014 and 2016 repeal bills died in the state Senate on 12-12 votes.

If we repeal the death penalty it moves us closer toward being the kind of society that I think we want to be, Keshen said. A more kind, a more compassionate society. And repealing the death penalty is a real statement of desire to aim toward those goals and thats why for me its important and why I continue to do this work.

The coalition also awarded three of the states newspapers, the Portsmouth Herald, Concord Monitor and Keene Sentinel, with its Gov. William Badger Award, for outstanding and persistent editorial advocacy of death penalty repeal.

William Badger served as New Hampshires governor from 1834 to 1836 and called for the abolition of the death penalty.

The humanity of mankind revolts at the idea of taking the life of a fellow human being, Badger said in a message to the Legislature in 1834.

Farrell got involved in the fight against the death penalty in 1976, after the Supreme Court found it constitutional and reinstated it after a four-year hiatus.

I was working on the show (M*A*S*H) and getting involved in things like fighting a ballot proposition attempting to keep gay people from teaching in our schools. Then a minister from Nashville contacted me. He was fighting the death penalty and had read that I opposed it. He needed someone with visibility to help him stop the bloodbath he saw coming.

Farrell said he used his celebrity to raise awareness about the plight of death row inmates and to get their advocates access to governors and others in power to review their cases or commute their sentences.

Anyone who looks seriously at the death system in this country knows its racist in application, is primarily used against the poor and the poorly defended, is more expensive 18 times more in California than life in prison, and it entraps, savages and sometimes kills the innocent, some of whom I can name, Farrell said.

While 18 states have repealed the death penalty, many others, including Farrells home state of California, have repeatedly voted to keep and even expand it. The New Hampshire House will vote on a bill this week that seeks to expand the states death penalty to include those who kill children. A House committee that heard testimony regarding the bill recommended against it, deeming it inexpedient to legislate.

Farrell, like Keshen and many other coalition members, noted that state sanctioned killing not only destroys the life of the person on death row, it damages the people who conduct the execution and society as a whole.

There is an inevitable, inescapable consequence associated with the taking of a human life, Farrell said. The person losing her or his life pays a price, of course. But what is the price paid by those who do the killing? What is the cost to the society that tells people to kill for them not the economic cost, which is tremendous, but the moral cost, to all of us.

Several times during his address Farrell paused and stated simply: I hate this system.

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*M*A*S*H star speaks out against death penalty - Seacoastonline.com