CONCORD — The most meaningful moment for Andru Volinsky this year wasn’t on the campaign trail. It wasn’t even in New Hampshire.
On a January afternoon, the Executive Councilor sat in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, waiting on a plastic chair. Next to him was Jimmy Meders, a white inmate convicted in the 1987 killing of a convenience shop worker during a robbery. Next to Meders was his mother and family.
Meders was due to face his execution at 7:30 that evening. Volinsky had fought to stop it for 30 years. Meders had long insisted that the trigger had been pulled by another man at the scene. But the appeals were exhausted and now he was down in Georgia.
He’d taken a week off from his state duties and gubernatorial campaign to bear witness. There wasn’t much more to say.
Into the room walked the lawyer representing Meders’s clemency attempt with an inscrutable face.
“Your sentence has been commuted,” the lawyer told Meders. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles had issued a rare clemency for a death row case — the 10th time since 1976. Meders’s sentence would be commuted to life without parole.
The news seemed impossible to process. Meders’s conviction had been issued before there was an option for “life without parole,” for a crime that these days wouldn’t warrant capital punishment. Faye Meders was speechless. And Volinsky, who had put more years and effort into Meders’s case than any death row inmate before, was faced with something new: resolution.
“It puts a lot of things in perspective,” Volinsky said in an interview at his Concord home, recalling the story.
Now in the final weeks of his primary campaign for governor, the 64-year-old Volinsky is vying to leave the legal world that brought him to Atlanta. But the path to that room is the same one he’s hoping will guide him to New Hampshire’s corner office.
Volinsky has been a lawyer for 40 years. That doesn’t mean he fits the preconceptions of one, he says.
Volinsky went to high school in Eastern Pennsylvania in Levittown, the prototypical planned suburban community with a checkered history with race. Founded by Bill and Alfred Levitt as one of a series of similar planned communities in the 1950s, the town’s founders did initially not allow African Americans to purchase homes, miring it in conflicts with the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP for decades.
It was suburbia, but it was also firmly blue-collar, the candidate says.
“I graduated with 1,000 kids in my class,” said Volinsky. “School without resources and racial issues.”
His dad was a mechanic and maintenance man. He played football through high school. His first car cost $35; it was towed to the front of the house. His dad taught him to fix it back to working order.
Volinsky was the only one in his family to go to college. It’s no accident, he says. For most of his childhood, Volinsky wanted to leave his small town. He read early on, for hours, escaping in a backyard tree. More than half of his peers didn’t go to college, he recalls. Education was the best escape mechanism.
“Just intuitively, I knew the way for me to get out of Levittown was to go away to college,” he said.
That came true in a literal sense. Through a scholarship, Volinsky took the opportunity to study at the University of Miami, a beach-lined metropolis a world away.
Volinsky’s parents never pushed him to leave. But they still had expectations for him.
“My parents thought if you’re smart and you do well in school, you should become a doctor.” So off he went to college, in a pre-Med program. But if it was hard work that got him into the college, it was the quality of his hometown education that held him back. Having gone to school without a proper laboratory, Volinsky was adept at science at a technical level, but not at a practical one.
“It was really clear how far behind I was,” Volinsky said.
Ultimately, he switched to the social sciences, taking up psychology. But the sting of the experience him would follow him for decades, returning to him in the small New Hampshire city of Claremont.
Veering from medicine to psychology, Volinsky’s path was never fixed. But eventually it gravitated toward the law. That’s where he met Amy Goldstein.
He was a law student at Georgetown, she was studying law at George Washington University, but they might never have known each other if not for a specific shared interest. Washington, D.C., has a city-wide poverty-law clinic staffed by students of all its law schools. The clinic was populated by an alternative subsection of law students — the ones interested more in public aid than in landing on the law review and attracting the attention of firms.
The two aspiring lawyers got their start taking on everything from small claims to drug misdemeanors, Goldstein, who now goes by Amy Volinsky, taking civil cases and Andru taking criminal ones.
“It just seemed like a really good fit almost immediately,” she said.
In Volinsky’s first major case, he proved that a police detective wrongfully testified to witnessing a drug deal. The young lawyer snuck into the apartment and found that the policeman could not have seen what he said he saw from the vantage point. He won the case on acquittal.
Soon, the couple’s relationship and eventual marriage would take them to Tennessee, where they threw themselves into a public defender role at the University of Tennessee law school. Tennessee was where Volinsky first took on capital punishment cases.
Guided by Stephen Bright, his clinical instructor in Washington D.C. and one of the country’s foremost death penalty defense lawyers, Volinsky began trying cases. It was Bright who inspired Volinsky to take on everything from prison litigation to public defense. And it was Bright who Volinsky called this January, near a prison in Georgia, hours before one of the hardest days of his career.
“In a lot of places justice just doesn’t happen,” he said. “If you don’t have resources, you just can’t defend yourself. Guilty or not guilty.”
Volinsky continued to take death penalty cases on a volunteer basis for decades. But it was his move to New Hampshire that set the young lawyer’s career in an entirely new direction.
The first time Volinsky saw the Granite State, he was leading a bicycle camping trip down from the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont and across New Hampshire’s Kancamagus Highway in the White Mountains, at 23 years old.
The second time was under different circumstances. After a few years in Tennessee, the Volinskys needed change. They had a child on the way, and Amy Volinsky wanted to be closer to family in Massachusetts.
The journey between moving to New Hampshire and suing its school funding system was a shorter one than might be expected. Upon arrival, Volinsky fell in with more legal aid lawyers in the state, working in the public defender’s office and then a series of private firms. Through Concord lawyers, he learned the story of the Claremont school district.
The city of Claremont had already sued the state — with the help of a team of private law firms — alleging a lack of school funding fairness under then-Gov. John H. Sununu. But the emerging settlement had not been honored by the state. This time around, those private firms and lawyers were not thrilled to step up to the plate. If a second lawsuit were going to happen, it would have to be done with its own team.
Through the Concord YMCA, a team of interested workers met through a running group. Volinsky signed up quickly. “It was exactly the kind of case I went to law school to do,” Volinsky said.
Still, suing the state over an unfair education funding mechanism meant more than taking on the Attorney General’s Office. It also meant confronting an educational system that many governors, Republican and Democratic, did not want to change. While the local property tax school funding system created disparities from town to town, it also afforded a high degree of local control — and kept daunting statewide taxes down. It was not a system anyone could easily change without consequences.
The new legal team had few resources. They were pushing for another settlement, not a multi-year journey to the state Supreme Court. But along the 10-year journey, the team didn’t exactly make progress on a settlement. “No governor would ever talk to us,” Volinsky said. “None. Judd Gregg, Steve Merrill, Jeanne Shaheen. None.”
So the case plowed ahead to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
The resulting decision, in 1997, was supposed to provide the final fix: a binding order that the state of New Hampshire ensure funding for an “adequate” education in each town. Twenty-three years later, Volinsky says that promise hasn’t been fulfilled. And this time, he argues, there are more Democrats who agree.
Volinsky’s public legal battle with New Hampshire’s school funding formula is now years in the past. But in many ways it still defines the race he’s running today.
The state’s inability to fairly distribute school funding doesn’t just make school districts unequal, Volinsky says. It prompts increases to property taxes as well. Turning that trend around and lowering property tax burdens requires a ground-up reimagining of the way the state collects revenue to pay for services, Volinsky argues. And that means exploration of a broad-based tax.
This year, the classic third rail of New Hampshire politics — adding a sales or income tax — is getting some attention from Democrats. For Volinsky, the controversial idea is the best approach to finish in the political sphere what he started in the judicial.
Volinsky, who was an earlier supporter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid and also campaigned for him this year, has not floated a concrete plan for what that kind of tax might look like, a fact that his primary opponent has criticized. But he says it’s the only way to stem the rise in property taxes, which he considers broad-based themselves.
And yes, Volinsky says, the COVID-19 pandemic is the right time to start.
“I think this actually has to be the time,” he said. “Because the pandemic’s made it so much harder for so many people to pay their property taxes. …The pandemic’s made all of the problems more acute, brought them more to the surface, made them more real.”
The issue, more than any other, provides the divider between Volinsky and his Democratic opponent in the Sept. 8 primary, state Sen. Dan Feltes, a fellow Concord attorney. (The winner will take on Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.)
But from Volinsky’s view, it’s one more fight to give.
“I’ve waited 30 years for someone else to step up,” he said. “… Most are political insiders who won’t challenge the status quo. I’m doing this to fulfill the promise of Claremont.”