(Telegraph file photo) Nashua resident Eduardo Lopez is shown listening to testimony at the April hearing on his motion to suspend the remainder of his sentence. A judge agreed to suspend 5 years of the sentence.

NASHUA — After spending countless hours reviewing a seemingly endless trove of pleadings, statements, transcripts, attachments, appendices “and other pertinent materials submitted by the parties” in the Eduardo Lopez Jr. murder case, Superior Court Judge Charles Temple has filed his order in response to Lopez’s motion asking the court to suspend the remaining one-third of his minimum 45-year State Prison sentence.

Temple, in his order issued Friday, granted Lopez’s motion in part, agreeing to suspend 5 years of the remaining 14 years of his 45-years-to-life sentence, representing a compromise between denying the motion altogether and granting it in full.

Lopez, now 48, had just turned 17 when he gunned down well-known Nashua businessman Robie Goyette in front of a downtown restaurant the evening of March 23, 1991.

As paramedics tended to Goyette, whose car rolled into a post on West Pearl Street after he was shot, the majority of Nashua’s on-duty officers and detectives swarmed the downtown area searching for the suspect.

They eventually identified Lopez as the suspect, and found him outside his residence at Spring and East Pearl streets. A physical struggle ensued, but officers soon took him into custody.

Lopez was later tried and eventually convicted of first-degree murder by a Superior Court jury in June 1993, and was sentenced to State Prison for what was then a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Temple’s Friday order means that Lopez will, barring any substantial violations of the terms of the sentence, be eligible for parole on June 15, 2031, rather than his previous parole date of July 12, 2036.

Lopez and his case made news again about 15 years into his life sentence, when he became one of four New Hampshire murder defendants to be awarded re-sentencing hearings, based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Eighth Amendment forbids “a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders.”

In 2017, now-former Hillsborough County Superior Court South Judge Lawrence Smukler, presiding over a hearing that filled his courtroom with members and friends of the Lopez and Goyette families, resentenced Lopez to a term of 45 years to life with the possibility of parole.

In early April, several years after coming up short on an unrelated appeal of the verdict to the state Supreme Court, Lopez, backed by many family members and friends, stood before Temple flanked by his lawyers, Attorneys Pamela Jones and Paul Borchardt, in hopes of convincing Temple that he is a far different person today than the “17-year-old punk” he was some 31 years ago.

In Friday’s order, meanwhile, Temple explained that while Lopez’s sentence of 45-years-to-life “is an appropriate punishment … given the nature of Mr. Lopez’s deadly actions,” the punishment “is tempered by the exceptional behavior Mr. Lopez has exhibited at the prison … the record is replete with evidence of rehabilitation and reform,” Temple noted.

Therefore, he wrote, “the court exercises its discretion under (the statute) to adapt the sentence in a manner designed to accomplish the constitutional goals of punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence.”

His decision, Temple wrote further, “is not meant to minimize the gravity of Mr. Lopez’s homicidal and assaultive conduct,” adding that “the court has great empathy for the unending pain and suffering imposed on the Goyette family.”

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.