From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
House Bill 638 creates a possibility for parole for prisoners serving a legislatively imposed automatic life sentence for first degree murder; “legislatively imposed” because there is no sentencing discretion. Offenders, to be eligible for a second look, must be at least 60 years of age, have served a minimum of 18 years and not been disciplined for more than a decade. The bill would apply to someone like Gary Place.
Gary Place of Concord murdered his finance Wanda Olsen in 1983. He then turned himself in and accepted responsibility. He’s been in prison serving life ever since. He’s now 76. Despite his crime, Place has the support of his family, members of his Concord community and of the sister of his victim, Ms. Olsen’s only surviving relative. His former prosecutor also thinks he should be out of prison.
Place rejected a plea deal that would have led to a sentence that he would have completed decades ago. One wonders if it was hubris or a desire to be punished more severely that led him to reject the plea offer.
Instead, Gary Place went to trial claiming insanity based on his untreated PTSD resulting from his military service in Viet Nam. His plea of PTSD was the first case in the nation to test this ground. Place was a Marine sergeant who served during the 77 day long siege at Khe Sanh, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Viet Nam War. Place’s Marine unit received a presidential commendation from Lyndon Johnson for their heroism. They were then abandoned as civilians. Place’s job, while dodging mortar fire to re-supply outposts, was collecting the body parts of fallen soldiers.
In 2018, the assistant attorney general who prosecuted Mr. Place came forward to support a commutation of his sentence to the 35 years he had then served but the Executive Council refused to afford him a hearing. Councilor Joe Kenney and I supported Place’s request for a hearing. Councilor Kenney is a retired Marine colonel. Councilors Wheeler, Pappas and Prescott opposed the hearing. Regardless, then-Governor Sununu would have vetoed a commutation for political reasons.
Place has been incarcerated first at Concord and then in Berlin for decades. He’s shown remorse, taken every mental health course that he could and now teaches or facilitates: Understanding Anger, Solution Focused Group, Journey of Awareness, Self-Discovery, House of Healing, Mindfulness of Meditation, PTSD Group, Co-Occuring Disorder Group, Men’s Work, Socialization, and Psychological First Aid. At the request of the prison system, he’s also helped fellow prisoners and met with Chambers of Commerce, Leadership Concord and Leadership Manchester, law students, NH Court Clerks, students from UNH, graduates of the SHOCK incarceration program, among others.
Place is not eligible for parole because of his life sentence. HB638 would allow Gary Place and others like him to meet the parole board and allow the parole board to do its jobs. Anyone opposing Place’s release could testify before the parole board.
Please urge your legislator to support HB 638. If you are able, come testify at the hearing on February 7th at 10 a.m. in Room 202 of the Legislative Office Building. If you can’t testify in person, show your support online here.
Editor’s note: You can watch the public hearing before the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee here on Youtube as it took place today, Feb. 7. Testimony on HB 638 is at about 1:12 into the video of the hearing. See below.
Frank Edelblut is Up for Re-Appointment.
What will Governor Ayotte do?
Edelblut was first appointed education commissioner by a grateful Chris Sununu in February 2017. Sununu beat Edelblut in the Republican primary by four percent. When Edelblut fell in line, rather than preparing for another run at the Republican nomination, Sununu owed him. Being appointed education commissioner was Sununu’s pay off to Edelblut. Commissioners serve four-year terms. Edelblut’s second term is up now. Will Ayotte re-appoint him? What does she owe him?
Edelblut is to NH what US Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was to the nation in Trump’s first term, only Edelblut has fewer checks on his power and is more devious and destructive. As NH’s ed commissioner, Edelblut secured one of the nation’s largest grants to support charter schools (from DeVos). The grant would have obligated NH to take over funding for a slew of new charters once the federal funding ran out. Even though the legislature rejected the $46 million grant, Edelblut still committed $17 million to charter expansion.
Edelblut was called to testify in the ConVal school funding trial in 2023. He was asked what constitutes an adequate education. His answer: “dunno.” What about the $4100 the state assigns to pay for adequacy? Is that sufficient? “Dunno, that either.” Edelblut was so useless neither party called him to testify in our Rand school funding case last October.
Edelblut pushed for and implemented an unmanageable voucher system that subsidizes religious education at the expense of public education. He’s also worked to protect the voucher program from being audited. Although he first promised vouchers would cost $130,000, then $3.3 million. Vouchers cost the state $27 million during its first two years of operations. That number is projected by Edelblut to increase to $30 million a year—and that’s with an income cap. Edelblut and the Republicans would like to remove the income eligibility cap and make vouchers universally available regardless of a family’s income. That’s right, he wants you to pay some of the cost to send a rich kid to private school that he’s already attending. Remember, vouchers were only approved in an undemocratic move that put vouchers in Chris Sununu’s budget bill rather than have it stand alone. Only 600 of the 3800 citizens who testified on the voucher bill supported it.
Vouchers, whose origin was in the South’s resistance to desegregation, have become a subsidy for rich people. In NH, more than three fourths of the families using vouchers did not have their kids in public school before they took the voucher money. Though Edelblut, and his Koch Brother friends at the Bartlett Center and at Americans for Prosperity push vouchers as facilitating school choice, they really are about dismantling the public education system that Edelblut is supposed to support and manage.
Frank Edelblut’s confirmation hearing in February 2017 was my first hearing as an Executive Councilor. My approach was to respect that Sununu won the election and should have some leeway on the politics of his nominees as long as they were qualified for the position they would hold. Not having any experience or academic training in education, and having home schooled all of his children, I had my doubts about Edelblut but I prepared as I would for any important hearing. I met with Edelblut, asked people about him and studied any information I could find about him, including his resume which led me to Patrick Henry College in Virginia.
Edelblut was a foundation board member of Patrick Henry College, “PHC” to its friends. PHC bills itself as a “conservative Christian college.” It claims to “stand apart from all other conservative Christian colleges. PHC exists for Christ and for Liberty and challenges the status quo.” I was stunned to learn that board members, like Edelblut, took an oath to support the bible as factually true. At his confirmation hearing, I asked Edelblut if he truly believed women were second class citizens as they were created from man’s rib and how he would reconcile his beliefs in the literal truth of the bible when NH science curricula taught evolution, not creationism.
For this, I earned one of a handful of Union Leader editorials that called me out by name. I’ve pasted the editorial below. It’s kind of a badge of honor. The last line of the editorial reads, “Edelblut did not take the bait, reminding Volinsky that the state education commissioner should leave classroom instruction to teachers and school boards.” I’ll let my readers reach their own conclusions on whether I was right to worry about Edelblut and to distrust his promise to not mix church and state in his role as the most senior administrator in NH’s public school system.
Postscript below image….
I will add one postscript. I think it means something when an election is won and that winners should, within reason, have their choice of cabinet officials, but I categorically reject the idea that a president or a governor can put any dangerous, unqualified toady in charge of important government agencies. I add this post script to express my grave and utter disappointment at the votes of NH Senators Shaheen and Hassan to confirm Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the cudgel Trump will use to harass and demean immigrants. Shaheen and Hassan were two of only seven Democratic senators who voted for Noem.
For more on vouchers, go here.
