Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Police Can Lie in the Room. Not on the Report.

The law that lets an officer deceive you in the interrogation room makes it a crime to carry that habit into the report. New Hampshire still keeps a growing list of officers it can’t fully vouch for on the stand.

A police report is supposed to be the boring part. An officer writes down what happened, signs it, and the document drops into a file that sets bail, drives plea deals, and gets read aloud to juries who tend to believe it. The law treats that report as something close to sacred. It also spends the hour before the report is written letting the same officer lie to a suspect’s face.

Granite State Report walked through the first half of that arrangement already. In New Hampshire an officer may legally deceive a suspect during interrogation, a tactic the U.S. Supreme Court blessed in 1969 and the state’s own courts still apply, while a citizen who lies back can be charged. We laid out that double standard here. This is the follow-up, and it asks the question the first piece left open. If the state trains its officers that strategic lying is a legitimate tool, and the law agrees, what stops the habit at the door of the one room where lying is a crime?

The honest answer: not much, beyond an officer’s own discipline, a thin layer of oversight, and a list the state keeps of the ones already caught crossing the line. That is the GSR position. The rest of this is the evidence for it.

The line the law really draws

Start with the law, because the contradiction only lands once you see how sharp the line is. The interrogation lie is protected. The report lie is not. It is a crime, and not a vague one.

A police report is a government record. An officer who knowingly enters a falsehood into one fits the terms of RSA 641:7, tampering with public records, a misdemeanor on its face. Fabricate or doctor evidence while a case is pending and the conduct climbs to RSA 641:6, falsifying physical evidence, a class B felony. Lie under oath on the stand or in a sworn affidavit and it is RSA 641:1, perjury, also a felony. None of these statutes carve out a law-enforcement exception. The officer who lies in the report is exposed to the same code the lying citizen is.

On top of that criminal exposure sits a constitutional duty pointing the other way. Under Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States, prosecutors must hand the defense any evidence that undercuts a police witness, including proof the officer has lied before. A documented liar in uniform is more than a criminal-code problem. He becomes a standing disclosure obligation, which is the whole reason New Hampshire built the list this piece will come back to.

The habit doesn’t ask which room it’s in

Here is where the first piece and this one connect. The law permits police to lie in interrogation on one theory: that deception is a legitimate means to a legitimate end, pulling a true confession out of a guilty suspect. Officers are trained in it and rewarded when it works. The trouble with teaching anyone that a lie can serve justice is that the lesson arrives without a map of where it stops applying.

Researchers who study police perjury have made this point for decades. Because officers tend to believe both interrogation deception and courtroom shading serve public safety, the justification for one transfers to the other. The most cited account comes from the 1994 Mollen Commission, the New York investigation that found officers committing perjury and falsifying records so routinely that the practice had its own street name. The commission called falsification of records “the most common form of police corruption.” Officers in other cities coined their own labels: “testilying” for the witness stand, “creative writing” for the report.

None of this is a New York problem or a relic of the 1990s. The National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks documented wrongful convictions nationwide, has found police misconduct in roughly a third of its cases. Its catalog includes officers who falsified reports and planted evidence on something close to an assembly line: one Houston narcotics detective tied to seventeen exonerations, one Chicago sergeant whose fabrications eventually unraveled more than two hundred convictions. Those are the cases that got caught. The registry’s own authors say the great majority never surface at all.

The report was never a clean transcript

There is a second reason the report earns scrutiny, and this one has nothing to do with bad faith. Long before any officer decides whether to shade a fact, the ordinary way human beings build a case has already bent the document.

The wrongful-conviction literature has a name for it: tunnel vision, the narrowing that sets in when an investigator locks onto a suspect early and then reads each new fact as confirmation. Its companion is confirmation bias, the pull toward evidence that fits the theory and away from evidence that cuts against it. A report written under that pull is not a neutral recording of an encounter. It is a selection. The officer decides which details matter, which earn a sentence and which get left on the floor, and those choices line up behind a conclusion already reached.

Add the rationalization scholars call noble cause corruption, the belief that bending the rules is acceptable once you are sure you have the right person, and the report becomes the place where a hunch quietly hardens into a fact. The police-perjury literature has documented officers omitting exculpatory details, the facts that pointed the other way, from the reports they forwarded to prosecutors. No statute is broken by leaving a sentence out. The story still comes out tilted, and the tilt favors the version the officer already believed.

New Hampshire keeps a list

None of this is abstract here, because the state already concedes the problem exists by maintaining a roster of the officers it cannot fully vouch for. It is called the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule, and nearly everyone still calls it the Laurie List, after the 1995 case State v. Laurie that forced its creation.

The list exists to satisfy the Brady and Giglio duty. It catalogs officers whose personnel files hold information bearing on their credibility, so prosecutors know when they must warn a defendant. For years it stayed secret. A 2020 ruling in a case brought by New Hampshire newsrooms and the ACLU pried it open, and a 2021 statute, RSA 105:13-d, made it a public record under the Right-to-Know Law.

Read the criteria for landing on it and the through-line of this piece appears in plain text. Among the conduct that puts an officer on the schedule is a deliberate lie “in a police report.” The state of New Hampshire maintains, updates, and now publishes a list whose own entry criteria include lying in the document the public is told to trust.

As of the attorney general’s most recent compliance reporting, the public list carried more than 260 names, though many of those officers have left policing. The histories behind the entries are not hypothetical. In a 2024 decision, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reviewed the cases of three retired state troopers placed on the schedule after an internal investigation found they had inflated their traffic-enforcement numbers; the troopers admitted padding the activity reports. Different officers, different years, the same act the list was built to catch: a report that said something other than what happened.

Officers fight hard to stay off the list, and for an understandable reason. As one county attorney conceded in open court, placement is treated as “a kind of a death list” for a career. That stigma is real, and it is the strongest argument the officers have. It is also proof that the system understands exactly how serious a lie on a report is, even while it protects the lie told an hour earlier in the interview.

What this is, and what it isn’t

Be precise about the claim, because precision is what separates accountability from a smear. GSR is not arguing that New Hampshire police are liars, or that most reports are fiction. They are not. The large majority of officers write the truth, the large majority of reports are accurate, and inclusion on the Laurie List is not by itself a finding that an officer is dishonest. The attorney general says as much.

The argument is narrower and harder to wave off. A system that legally blesses strategic deception in one room, trains officers to use it, then leans on those same officers’ unsworn word in the next room is running on a contradiction. It calls a police lie a tool when it points at a suspect and a crime when it points at the truth, and it trusts the people holding both to keep the line straight on their own. The list of names is the state’s own admission the line gets crossed. The exoneration data is the admission it gets crossed often enough to convict innocent people.

The fix is not distrust. It is verification, the thing that makes an officer’s honesty checkable instead of assumed. Recorded interrogations settle the dispute over what was said. Body cameras settle the dispute over what happened. A complete and public Laurie List settles the dispute over who has lied before. New Hampshire has some of this and not enough of it, and the same Legislature that spent last session drafting new penalties for civilians who lie about police has shown no comparable appetite for checking the officers’ own account.

The first piece ended on the only protection the law hands a citizen in that room: the right to stop talking. This one ends on the protection the public still does not have, a reliable way to know whether the report telling our story is true. Until the state is as serious about the lie that goes into the file as it is about the lie that comes out of a suspect’s mouth, the asymmetry is not confined to the interrogation room. It is sitting in the record.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Statutory text was read on the New Hampshire General Court site; case holdings on Justia and the New Hampshire Law Library. Claims marked ATTRIBUTED rest on the work of named researchers or organizations rather than a single primary dataset: the National Registry of Exonerations’ tallies, and the police-perjury scholarship summarizing how officers rationalize deception. The central claim that the legality of interrogation deception can leave officers with a false sense of license to shade reports is GSR’s analysis and argument, supported by that scholarship; it is not a finding about any individual New Hampshire officer. Inclusion on the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule is not, by itself, proof that an officer lied. Characterizations of the law as a “contradiction” and judgments about what the Legislature owes the public are the opinion of the publication. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.