CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – A three-judge panel reduced the prison sentence of a woman who first lied about a murder case as a teenager and then helped solve it as an adult.

Melanie Paquette Cooper’s new sentence is 15 to 30 months, down from three to six years.

Cooper had asked the panel reduce her prison sentence to the six months she has already served, arguing she cooperated with police on a 20-year-old murder case that had stalled. The Attorney General’s Office supported the request.

On Friday, the judges said there is every indication that after prison, Cooper will return to being a law-abiding citizen and mother. But they said she deserves prison time because the information she originally concealed “involved the most serious of crimes, the intentional taking of human life.”

Cooper was the state’s key witness last year against Eric Windhurst, a high school classmate who fatally shot Cooper’s stepfather, Danny Paquette, in 1985. Cooper admitted in 2005 that she went with Windhurst to Paquette’s Hooksett farm.

At the sentence review hearing last week, Paquette’s family strongly opposed Cooper’s request for leniency.

“She’s been lying to everyone in her life for the last 20 years,” said Doug Paquette, Danny Paquette’s nephew. “She had her day in court and she blew it.”

Cooper, who was 15 at the time, said she told Windhurst, then 17, that Paquette had sexually abused and raped her and she feared he would hurt her again if he learned she was back in New Hampshire. She had been living in another state.

Prosecutors said Windhurst had learned about the same time that his sisters had been molested in separate incidents, and the shooting was his form of revenge.

“He offered to kill Danny Paquette. He had to take his anger out on someone, and he took it out on Danny Paquette,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin said during the hearing. “He did it more for his own reasons than for her.”

Still, Paquette’s family said the blame lies with Cooper.

Windhurst told a girlfriend years later that Cooper wanted Paquette dead. But Cooper testified that she didn’t take his offer to kill her stepfather seriously, even as she walked with him toward Paquette’s farm.

Windhurst pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is serving a 15-to-36-year prison sentence.

Cooper, 37, a married mother of five whose family lives in Evanston, Wyo., pleaded guilty to hindering apprehension for initially lying to police. Her husband and five children shouldn’t buy her any sympathy, one of Danny Paquette’s nieces told the judges.

“She’ll be reunited with her family soon, and Danny is still dead. We miss him at the holidays just like you miss your children,” Jennifer Chasse said. “She had every opportunity to stop it, but did not.”

The panel of judges that reduced Cooper’s sentence said the harsher prison term would have been appropriate had Cooper been an accomplice to the murder, but said her actions amounted to “teenage cluelessness” rather than criminal intent.

“At the time of the murder, the defendant did not act with a purpose of facilitating Mr. Paquette’s murder; indeed she failed to put two and two together to realize that a real murder was about to be committed,” the panel said.

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