Robert R. Cushing Sr., a retired elementary-school teacher, was watching a basketball game on television at his home in New Hampshire in 1988 when he heard a knock at the door. When he answered it, a man fired two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun, killing him in front of his wife, and fled.
A neighbor later told Mr. Cushing’s oldest son, Robert Jr., known as Renny, that he hoped the killer would “fry.”
But that was the last thing Renny Cushing wanted. Although his father had just been gunned down, he saw no point in responding to one violent death with another.
“Filling another coffin doesn’t do anything to bring our loved ones back,” he told the Death Penalty Information Center in a 2019 podcast. “It just widens the circle of pain.”


Moreover, he said, seeking the death penalty would mean betraying his values. “If we let those who kill turn us into killers,” he often said, “then evil triumphs, and we all lose.”
Instead of pursuing a path of vengeance, Mr. Cushing, then a New Hampshire state representative who had opposed capital punishment on an intellectual level, devoted himself to abolishing it. After three decades of defeats and near misses, he succeeded: the state repealed its statute in 2019, becoming the 21st state and the last in New England to take the death penalty off the books.
Renny Cushing died on March 7 at his home in Hampton, N.H. He was 69. The cause was prostate cancer with complications from Covid, his wife, Kristie Conrad, said.
While Mr. Cushing had told his fellow Democrats of his diagnosis of stage 4 prostate cancer in August 2020, they elected him anyway as House Democratic leader when Republicans regained control that November. He continued as minority leader until he took a leave of absence five days before he died.
Mr. Cushing was a longtime champion of progressive causes, leading efforts to decriminalize the use of marijuana, legalize same-sex marriage and defeat right-to-work legislation.


He came to prominence in the 1970s as a founding member and organizer of the Clamshell Alliance, which opposed the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. Seabrook was the scene of numerous protests, including one in 1977 in which Mr. Cushing was among the more than 1,400 people arrested. One of the earliest antinuclear groups, Clamshell was a model for many others, which together helped slow the building of nuclear plants across the United States.
It was his father’s murder that eventually thrust him into the role of chief catalyst for abolishing the death penalty.
His father was shot by a disturbed off-duty police officer who had harbored a grudge since the senior Mr. Cushing had tried to get him fired for police brutality in 1976. The man later confessed to the killing and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 1998, Renny Cushing became executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, which promoted reconciliation between families and offenders. He traveled the country speaking out against capital punishment, published a newsletter and counseled victims’ families, as well as the families of the condemned, on how to survive their trauma.
In 2004, he helped found Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, a broader offshoot that viewed capital punishment as a human rights violation and sought to end it around the world. He became its executive director. His devotion to the cause took on new urgency in 2011, when his brother-in-law, Stephen McRedmond, was shot and killed in Tennessee.
“I didn’t choose to be a murder survivor; the situation chose me,” Mr. Cushing said in an interview that appears on the website of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. “I can, however, have some effect on how I define the rest of my life. And this is my way of honoring my father’s memory.”


Robert Reynolds Cushing Jr. was born on July 20, 1952, in Portsmouth, N.H. His mother, Marie (Mulcahy) Cushing, was a teacher, like his father. She taught reading and managed a household of eight children in Hampton.


Renny had an instinct for politics from a young age. At 15, he spoke at the State House in favor of lowering the voting age to 18 from 21, arguing that if you were old enough to be sent to war in Vietnam, you were old enough to vote.
For a time he attended what is now Granite State College, in Concord, but dropped out. An autodidact, he taught himself Spanish and history, immersing himself in accounts of the labor movement and environmental studies.
Mr. Cushing took on a series of far-flung random jobs, including as a sanitation man on garbage trucks in Atlanta, a gold miner in Ontario, Canada, and a farmworker in Salinas, Calif., all of which gave him an appreciation for life on the margins. Back in New Hampshire, he worked as a welder and carpenter and was involved in union organizing.
Drawn to the 1976 presidential candidacy of the former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, Mr. Cushing met Ms. Conrad at a Harris rally in Manchester. They were married in 1989.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Marie Ellen, Elizabeth Agnes and Grace Bridget Cushing; three brothers, Matthew, Kevin and Timothy; and three sisters, Giovanna Hurley, Marynia Page and Christine Rockefeller. His brother Michael died in 1995.
Mr. Cushing made his first foray into elective politics in 1986, when he won a state House seat from Seabrook by just nine votes. After his father’s murder, he lost his bid for re-election and became involved with the trial of his father’s killer.


He also moved his young family into the house in Hampton where he had been raised and where his father had been killed.
“My dad and my grandfather built it,” he said in the website interview. “The killer may have taken my dad from us, but he wasn’t going to take my roots, too. Staying here was one way of regaining control over my life. Besides, with time, the house has become something else. The floors that were once stained with my father’s blood are also where my daughters learned how to walk.”
He successfully ran for the state House again in 1996 and eventually served a total of nine nonconsecutive two-year terms. Each session, he introduced a measure to repeal the state’s death penalty.
His decades-long effort finally paid off in 2019. With bipartisan support, both the House and Senate voted for repeal. When Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, vetoed the measure, both chambers mustered just enough votes to override it.
“For me,” Mr. Cushing told reporters afterward, “this is one of those moments when hope and history rhyme.”

Source: New York Times

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