The New Hampshire Supreme Court overturned Adam Montgomery’s murder conviction on Thursday for the fatal beating of his 5-year-old daughter, Harmony Montgomery, citing a procedural flaw in how the case was tried.
Montgomery, now 36, was convicted in 2024 of second-degree murder for recklessly causing his daughter’s death and second-degree assault for an earlier incident of physical abuse. But the high court ruled that keeping those two charges together in a single case jeopardized his right to a fair trial.
The Supreme Court reversed Montgomery’s conviction on the murder charge but affirmed his convictions for assault, falsifying physical evidence, witness tampering, and abusing his daughter’s corpse.
The public defender representing Montgomery on appeal, Pamela E. Phelan, said this ruling addresses important aspects of fairness in criminal proceedings.
“Justice is only served when we provide a person accused of a crime a fair and just trial,” Phelan said. “A trial that is not conducted with those principles in mind does not do justice to persons accused of a crime or people who are victims of crimes.”
A spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office, which prosecuted the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This ruling pertains to the sentence of 56 years to life in prison that Montgomery received in 2024 for his convictions in the murder trial. But it won’t affect the decades-long prison sentence he received in 2023 on unrelated firearms offenses.
Montgomery was also found civilly liable in May for his daughter’s death and ordered to pay nearly $15.5 million in damages to her estate as part of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the girl’s mother, Crystal Sorey, who reached a separate $2.25 million settlement with the state of New Hampshire.
The circumstances of Harmony Montgomery’s death in 2019 represent a shocking case of abuse that spurred calls for reform to child protection services in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Sorey lost custody of her daughter in 2018 as she struggled with substance misuse. She pushed for authorities to keep the child with a foster family while she sought to regain custody, but a Massachusetts judge instead awarded custody to the child’s father, Adam Montgomery, despite his violent criminal history.
Montgomery was convicted at trial of beating his daughter to death in December 2019 while they were living in a car in Manchester, N.H., after an eviction with his wife and two other children.
That newly overturned murder conviction had been based in part on gruesome testimony from Kayla Montgomery, the defendant’s estranged wife.
Adam Montgomery still stands convicted for the offenses based on testimony that he refrained from reporting his daughter’s death and hid her remains in a series of locations, including the ceiling of a homeless shelter and a walk-in freezer at the pizza shop where he worked for about a month.
Harmony’s disappearance went largely unnoticed by authorities for two years until Sorey grew frantic in late 2021 and came to Manchester to find her missing child.
Adam Montgomery never divulged the location of his daughter’s remains, which still have not been located.
This story has been updated to include comment from the public defender representing Montgomery.
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.
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