CONCORD, N.H. (Court TV) — More than two years after a jury found he killed his daughter, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has reversed Adam Montgomery‘s murder conviction.
Adam Montgomery arrives for his sentencing hearing at Hillsborough Superior Court on Thursday, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, Pool)
In 2024, a jury found Adam Montgomery guilty of second-degree murder, second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering and abuse of a corpse in the death of his daughter, 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery, who disappeared in 2019.
Harmony wasn’t reported missing until 2021, after her mother, Crystal Sorey, had spent months unsuccessfully trying to contact her. Sorey previously lost custody of her daughter due to substance abuse issues. At trial, Adam Montgomery admitted to helping dispose of his daughter’s body but claimed that it was his wife, Kayla Montgomery, who had killed Harmony.
In an opinion published on Thursday, New Hampshire’s highest court tossed the defendant’s conviction on second-degree murder, finding that the trial judge had improperly joined that charge with the charge for second-degree assault.
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The assault charge stemmed from an incident in July 2019, when Adam Montgomery’s uncle reported seeing Harmony with a black eye, while all the other charges at trial centered around the child’s death. Justice Bryan Gould authored the Court’s unanimous opinion finding that the evidence prosecutors had against the defendant for the July 2019 assault was far greater than the evidence proving the child’s murder.
Kayla Montgomery’s trial testimony was the only direct evidence implicating Adam Montgomery in his daughter’s death. By contrast, prosecutors presented three witnesses who observed Harmony with a black eye after the July incident and four witnesses who said that the defendant had admitted to hitting her.
Prosecutors pointed to DNA and fingerprint evidence that corroborated Kayla Montgomery’s testimony — to no avail. “The evidence,” Gould wrote, “supports only Kayla’s testimony about the defendant’s actions after the victim’s death; it does not corroborate Kayla’s testimony that the defendant killed the victim on December 7 by repeatedly punching her in the head. It is also not inconsistent with the defendant’s theory of the defense — namely that Kayla caused the victim’s death and the defendant helped her cover up her crime.”
The justices found that the strong evidence for the July 2019 assault, presented alongside the weaker evidence of the murder, created an opportunity for prejudice. “The disparity created a significant risk that the jury would rely on the strength of the evidence that the defendant struck the victim in anger in July to conclude that, as Kayla testified, he similarly — and fatally — struck the victim in December.”
While the Court tossed Adam Montgomery’s conviction on the murder charge, the justices found the other convictions should stand, finding that the weaker evidence presented for the murder charge had no impact on the jury’s decision for the assault charge. The other charges, including abuse of a corpse and falsifying physical evidence, Adam Montgomery’s own attorney conceded in her opening statement to the jury.
Adam Montgomery will remain behind bars, where he will continue to serve his sentence for the remaining convictions as well as previous convictions on weapons charges. The defendant was previously moved out of the New Hampshire prison system, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.
Earlier this week, a New Hampshire judge found in favor of Sorey in the wrongful death lawsuit she had filed against the defendant, according to records reviewed by Court TV.
