Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Police Can Lie to You. You Can’t Lie Back.

New Hampshire lets officers deceive you in the interrogation room. Lie back and the statute book has your name in it. That double standard is settled law, and last year the House voted to widen it.

Picture the room. A detective drops a folder on the table and tells you your buddy already gave a statement, that your prints are on the weapon, that the lab came back this morning. None of it is true. Every word can be a lie, and in all fifty states the detective is allowed to tell it. Now picture you saying the same kind of thing back across that table. Depending on what comes out of your mouth, you may have just committed a crime.

That is the deal in a New Hampshire interrogation room, and it is no glitch. The law runs openly in one direction. An officer may deceive a suspect to pull out a confession, a tactic blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court and applied by New Hampshire’s own courts. A suspect who deceives an officer can be charged under the state criminal code, or, if a federal agent is asking the questions, prosecuted for a felony. Same table, two rule books.

Here is the GSR position, stated plainly so no one mistakes it for neutral reporting: a system that treats a citizen’s lie as a crime while protecting the state’s lie as a tactic should at least be honest that it is doing so. New Hampshire is moving the other way.

What the badge is allowed to do

Start with the case every interrogator learns. In 1969 the Supreme Court decided Frazier v. Cupp, where police told a murder suspect, falsely, that his cousin had already confessed. The suspect talked. The Court let the confession stand, calling the lie “while relevant, insufficient” to bar an otherwise voluntary statement. Deception became one factor in a “totality of the circumstances” test, never a line in the sand.

That rule is the floor in every state, New Hampshire included. Police here are trained, like police everywhere, to lie about the strength of the evidence to crack a denial. New Hampshire’s courts apply the same yardstick under the state constitution. In State v. Aubuchont, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ran its totality-of-the-circumstances voluntariness inquiry and treated “trickery or deceit” as a factor to weigh, not an automatic bar. GSR has covered how the state polices truth on its own terms before, in its reporting on New Hampshire State Police polygraph practices.

The state does draw a few lines. In State v. Rezk, the court held that some police promises, such as confidentiality or immunity from prosecution, are different in kind, and a confession bought with one is involuntary as a matter of law. Letting the government revoke that kind of promise, the court said, would “sanction governmental deception” that violates due process. So the badge cannot promise you immunity and then renege. It can tell you the lab matched your DNA when no test was ever run.

What happens when you lie back

Now flip the chair. New Hampshire’s criminal code carries a row of statutes that turn a citizen’s lie into a charge.

RSA 641:4, false reports to law enforcement, makes it a misdemeanor to feed police false information meant to make them believe another person committed an offense, or to report a crime or danger you know never happened. RSA 641:3, unsworn falsification, reaches a false written statement on a form that warns you false statements are punishable. Lie to steer officers away from someone they are trying to arrest and you are looking at RSA 642:3, hindering apprehension, which can be charged as a felony. Tamper with a witness and it is RSA 641:5, a felony.

Be precise about how far this reaches, because precision is the difference between accountability journalism and a scare. New Hampshire’s false-report law is narrower than people assume. The state Supreme Court has held that simply giving police false information is not enough; prosecutors must prove your purpose was to make them believe another person committed an offense. State v. Hill said exactly that. A bare “no, I didn’t do it” to a town officer, standing alone, is usually not a chargeable false report under 641:4.

The broad trap sits one level up. Talk to a federal agent, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, an inspector working a case in New Hampshire, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes any materially false statement a felony punishable by up to five years. No oath required. The lie that buried Martha Stewart and the one that convicted Michael Flynn were both § 1001 charges, not the underlying conduct. The agent across the table may lie to you freely. You answer back wrong and the answer itself is the crime.

Silence is the only move that’s protected

Notice what the law does protect: not your right to a convenient lie, but your right to say nothing at all. The Fifth Amendment and Part I, Article 15 of the New Hampshire Constitution both bar the state from compelling you to “accuse or furnish evidence against” yourself. You can refuse to answer. Refusing is not a crime. Lying can be.

There is a catch the cases make brutally clear. The protection only kicks in if you invoke it, and you have to do it cleanly. In State v. Watson, the New Hampshire Supreme Court, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Berghuis v. Thompkins, held that a suspect who neither asked for silence nor asked for a lawyer had invoked nothing. Going quiet for a while, hedging, half-asking for a lawyer: none of it counts. You have to say it.

This is the part that should bother anyone who has watched a real interrogation. The escape hatch is silence, and the people who most need it are the ones least likely to use it. Research on false confessions finds that minors are two to three times more likely than adults to confess to crimes they did not commit. By the Innocence Project’s count, false confessions show up in roughly 30 percent of the convictions later overturned by DNA, and they are the most common thread in wrongful murder convictions. Frightened people talk. Lies told to frightened people produce some of those confessions.

Why this is a live question now

Two trends are pulling in opposite directions, and together they put New Hampshire’s silence on the record.

The first is reform. In 2021 Illinois became the first state to bar police from using deception while interrogating anyone under 18; a juvenile’s statement obtained through lies about evidence or false promises of leniency is presumed inadmissible. Oregon followed within weeks. By late 2024, at least ten states had passed laws effectively barring police from lying to kids in the interrogation room. New Hampshire is not one of them. In this state an officer may still lie to a sixteen-year-old about the evidence, and the resulting statement rises or falls on the same “totality” test applied to adults.

The second trend runs the other way, and it runs through Concord. In 2025 the New Hampshire House passed HB 109, a bill making it a crime for a citizen to knowingly file a false complaint of misconduct against a police officer: a misdemeanor for an alleged misconduct complaint, a Class A misdemeanor for an alleged criminal-conduct complaint. It cleared the House 198 to 173 before the Senate sent it back to committee, which killed it for the session. The bill is dead for now. The instinct behind it is not. Lawmakers spent a session working out new penalties for civilians who lie to or about police. No one filed a companion bill to limit when police may lie to civilians.

The case for the asymmetry is not nothing, and GSR will not pretend otherwise. Police groups that fought the juvenile-deception bans argue that deception pulls far more true confessions than false ones, and that taking the tactic away would let guilty people walk free. They are also right that false complaints against officers are real and can wreck a career, which is the honest argument for something like HB 109. Deception in the box has a real investigative logic.

None of that answers the asymmetry. The state has decided that lying to its agents is serious enough to be a crime, a defensible position. It has also decided that being lied to by its agents is a tactic worth protecting, and that the citizens with the least power in that room get no extra shield, not even the kids. New Hampshire has been willing to legislate one side of the interrogation table and not the other. That is a choice, and it deserves to be named as one.

GSR is not arguing that every police lie should be banned, or that a suspect who lies to frame a neighbor should walk. The point is narrower and harder to dodge. If the law is going to put a citizen’s lie in the criminal code, and is going to keep debating how many more such lies to add, it owes the public the same scrutiny of the lie told from the other chair. In New Hampshire that scrutiny does not exist. Until it does, remember the only line the law draws in your favor: you can stop talking, and you should say so out loud.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. Statute text was read on the New Hampshire General Court site and the Cornell Legal Information Institute; case holdings on Justia and FindLaw. Two figures are marked ATTRIBUTED because they rest on the Innocence Project’s tally and on summarized research rather than a single primary dataset; they are widely cited but not independently recounted here. Characterizations of the law as a “double standard” and judgments about what the Legislature owes the public are the opinion of the author. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.