Overview
- A New Hampshire judge resentenced Robert Tulloch on Monday to 45 years to life with credit for time served, which means he will be eligible to seek parole in about two decades.
- Tulloch was 17 when he and James Parker killed Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop in 2001 and was originally given automatic life without parole after pleading guilty to first-degree murder.
- Tulloch’s lawyers had urged a minimum term of 30 to 40 years based on his prison records, therapy notes showing remorse, and comparisons with other juvenile resentencings while prosecutors’ specific recommendation was not publicly disclosed.
- The hearing completed the last of five New Hampshire juvenile-life resentencings opened under the 2012 Supreme Court rulings that found mandatory juvenile life without parole unconstitutional and later made that change retroactive.
- Nationwide resentencings have generally shortened terms for juvenile lifers and New Hampshire lawmakers have declined to ban juvenile life without parole, leaving judges and individual resentencings as the main route for change and shaping outcomes for victims and incarcerated people.