Two Police Shootings Cleared in Two Weeks. One Officer’s Name Hidden Going on Five Years.

The Attorney General found the Manchester and Charlestown shootings legally justified. In one case the reasoning is public; in the other it stays sealed until the man who was shot is done being prosecuted. And the state’s police transparency list still cannot print a Lisbon officer’s name.

In the first two weeks of July, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office announced that police officers in Manchester and Charlestown were legally justified in shooting two men. In the same stretch, a former Lisbon officer’s fight to stay off the state’s public list of police with credibility problems rolled into its fifth year, his name still hidden.

Three cases, one pattern. New Hampshire’s police accountability machinery runs on a single office that reviews every use of deadly force, a single statute that supplies the test, and a single list meant to tell the public which officers’ word a courtroom cannot fully trust. This month showed what each of those delivers, and when: the finding first, the evidence later, and sometimes not on any schedule the public would choose.

I am not arguing the findings are wrong. I have not seen what the investigators saw, and that is the point. Here is what the record shows about how long it takes before anyone outside the system can check.

Eighteen shots on a December night

Nickenley Turenne was 24, Black, and unarmed. Before dawn on Dec. 6, 2025, a Manchester officer responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle found him and his girlfriend sleeping in his car near Green Acres Elementary School. Turenne fled, first in the car and then on foot through snowy backyards. Three officers, Andre Chan, Brandon Baliko and Devin Lambert, fired eighteen times. Five rounds hit him, according to accounts of the state’s report. He was holding a black flashlight, which he pointed at officers in a way they took for a pistol.

On July 1, Attorney General John Formella’s office released its 52-page report and its conclusion: the officers reasonably believed Turenne was “about to use, or was actively using, deadly force” against Officer Chan, and the shooting was legally justified. No charges will be filed. The report noted Turenne had told his girlfriend shortly before the encounter that he was thinking about ending his life, and it raised the possibility that he wanted police to shoot him.

That took 207 days. For most of them, the public record consisted of a news release and a name. Turenne’s family spent months holding vigils and asking to see the body camera footage. They were not shown it until the investigation closed, nearly eight months after he died, which is when the rest of us got still frames from the cameras in a report we could finally read.

Three cases, and what the public could read as of July 19. Graphic by Granite State Report.

Marsha Kazarosian, the family’s lawyer, reviewed the report and the footage and reached a different verdict. “I think Nickenley’s civil rights were violated,” she said, signaling the officers may yet answer in civil court. The Collective Power Coalition, a group of community organizations that pressed the city for months, put its response in one line: “The absence of criminal charges is not the same as justice.” Anthony Poore, president of the New Hampshire Center for Justice & Equity, watched the footage several times before saying anything. “It felt like a huge waste of life,” he told the Concord Monitor.

The defense of the officers is not hard to state fairly, and Rep. Terry Roy, the Deerfield Republican who chairs the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, states it plainly. A former officer himself, Roy told the Monitor that Turenne refused repeated commands, pointed the flashlight in a shooting stance, and had chances to end the encounter that he did not take; the officers had an instant to decide and no way to know the object was not a gun. Roy believes officers face enough restrictions on force already, and he runs the committee any change would have to pass through.

A verdict now, the reasoning later

Two weeks after the Turenne report, the same office announced its second clearing of the month. On July 15, the Attorney General determined that Charlestown Officer Jacob Sands was legally justified in shooting Christian Paquette, 23, on the night of Nov. 14, 2025.

The state’s account: Sands tried to stop a speeding car with no visible plates on Claremont Road. Paquette allegedly accelerated away, leading a pursuit that reached roughly 90 miles per hour, then stopped and ran. During the foot chase, according to the Attorney General’s Office, Sands saw a knife, ordered Paquette to drop it, and fired when Paquette moved toward him. Paquette was struck in the abdomen and arm. He survived, and he now faces charges brought through the Sullivan County Attorney’s Office. Those allegations are the state’s; they have not been tested in court, and Paquette is presumed innocent of the charges against him.

Here is the part that deserves more attention than it got. The office announced the conclusion but not the analysis. Citing the Rules of Professional Conduct and the open prosecution, it said the full investigative report, with the evidence, findings and reasoning behind the determination, will be released only after Paquette’s criminal case concludes.

There may be sound professional-responsibility grounds for that sequence. But notice what it does. The clearing lands in the news cycle today, unexaminable. The reasoning arrives months or years from now, when nobody is looking. That was 243 days from shooting to finding, with the substance still to come, and the office that made the finding controls the calendar.

The statute that decides every case

Both determinations rest on the same law. RSA 627:5, II says an officer is justified in using deadly force only when he “reasonably believes” it necessary, including to defend against what he reasonably believes is “the imminent use of deadly force.” The belief is judged from the officer’s position in the moment. It does not have to turn out to be correct, which is how a flashlight can lawfully be answered with eighteen rounds.

Read further down the section and you find something older. Paragraph VIII, enacted in 1971 and never repealed, provides that deadly force “shall be deemed reasonably necessary” whenever the officer reasonably believes the arrest is lawful and there is apparently no other possible means of making it. The Legislature added a chokehold ban to this statute in 2020 and left the fleeing-arrest presumption standing. Neither July determination needed it. It is still the law of New Hampshire.

The test the Attorney General applies, and the 1971 presumption still on the books beside it. Graphic by Granite State Report.

The office applying that statute is the state’s chief law enforcement agency, and it reviews every use of deadly force by police in New Hampshire. There is no separate body that second-guesses its determinations. The remaining check is civil court, which is where the Turenne family’s lawyer is pointing, and where the standard, the burden and the defendant’s wallet are all different questions.

The list that cannot say his name

The state’s other accountability instrument is a list. The Exculpatory Evidence Schedule, which everyone still calls the Laurie List after the 1995 Supreme Court case that created the duty behind it, names officers whose records contain evidence a defendant would be entitled to see, the kind that bears on whether the officer’s testimony can be trusted. In 2021 the Legislature made it public through RSA 105:13-d, effective that Sept. 24, with a safety valve: officers could sue to challenge their placement, anonymously, before their names were released.

A former Lisbon officer has been in that safety valve ever since. He sued as John Doe, contending the town put him on the list as retaliation, targeted by his chief. The town denies it. In August 2023, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled he could keep litigating under a pseudonym, over objections from press organizations and a law professor who intervened to unseal the case. In July 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court handed him a second win, finding that on his placement, “we cannot conclude, as a matter of law, that the process was adequate.” And this June, InDepthNH reported that his federal case against Lisbon is restarting after, in his telling of the court record, the town again denied him the process he was owed.

He may be right. The Supreme Court’s order suggests the state’s own procedure failed him, and a list that can ruin a career deserves due process worthy of the damage it does. But hold the two clocks side by side. The transparency law is 1,759 days old. Through every one of them, this officer’s name has stayed off the public version of the list the law was written to publish. As of the Attorney General’s February compliance report, 260 names are public and six removal lawsuits are still pending, out of 75 originally filed. The machinery for clearing officers runs in months. The machinery for naming them can be litigated into years.

Where the two sides meet

The Turenne case has produced one point of agreement worth building on. The report indicates Turenne was in crisis that morning. Poore’s coalition wants mental health professionals responding alongside or instead of police in moments like it, and wants de-escalation and bias training strengthened. Roy, who resists new restrictions on officers, does not resist that diagnosis. “This state is failing on mental health, beyond a doubt,” he said.

The training picture is moving the other way in one respect. John Scippa, who directs the Police Standards and Training Council, told the Monitor that the community policing session covering ethics, bias and de-escalation lost its mandatory refresher for working officers once the Legislature banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Recruits at the academy still take it, reworded to satisfy the new law. That session exists because a governor’s accountability commission recommended it in 2020. Its refresher is now optional for every officer already on the job.

What I have asked for

Granite State Report has filed a Right-to-Know request with the Department of Justice for the records that would let readers check this system instead of taking it on faith: the complete Turenne investigative file and body camera footage as releasable; the written policy governing when deadly force reports are withheld during prosecutions, and the projected release date for the Sands report; a ledger of every officer-involved shooting determination the office has made, with dates and outcomes, so the public can count for itself; and the current Exculpatory Evidence Schedule compliance figures, including names removed since 2021. The letter is reproduced with this article’s records file.

Two men were shot. One is dead, one is charged, three officers are cleared, one officer is invisible, and every document that would let you weigh any of it arrives on the state’s schedule, not yours. The findings may all be correct. A system this closed asks you to assume so. I would rather read the file, and I have asked for it.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Granite State Report has filed a Right-to-Know request with the New Hampshire Department of Justice for the Turenne investigative file and footage as releasable, the written policy on withholding deadly-force reports during prosecutions and the projected release date for the Sands report, a ledger of every officer-involved shooting determination with dates and outcomes, and current Exculpatory Evidence Schedule compliance figures including removals since 2021. This article will be updated when the department responds. Christian Paquette is charged, not convicted; the account of his actions is the state’s and is identified as such. The Lisbon officer is unnamed because his identity remains sealed by court order and the public list; his claims and the town’s denial are both reported. Quotations from other outlets are brief, attributed and credited by name. Corrections to granitestatereport@gmail.com.