Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

How to Remove a New Hampshire Judge — and Why It Almost Never Happens

The constitution gives elected officials two tools to force a judge off the bench. They have finished the job zero times since 1784. The mechanism that always works is a birthday.

Nobody in New Hampshire has ever voted for a judge, and under the current constitution nobody ever will. The governor nominates, the Executive Council confirms after a public hearing, and from that day forward the judge answers to no ballot. There is no election to lose, no recall to fear, and no term that expires.

What remains is a short list, and all of it sits in Part II of the state constitution. The House can impeach and the Senate can convict. The governor and council can remove a judge on a formal address passed by both chambers. And every judge, without exception, must leave office at 70. Below the removal line, a committee the Supreme Court created in 1977 polices conduct on the bench. That is the entire system. Here is how each piece works, and how rarely any of it ever has.

The heavy machinery: impeachment

Part II, Article 17 hands the impeachment power to the House of Representatives. Article 38 turns the Senate into a court to try whatever the House sends over, and it names the only grounds that count: “bribery, corruption, malpractice or maladministration, in office.” The process is spelled out with 18th-century precision. Senators must be individually sworn to try the charge impartially. The accused must be served with an attested copy of the impeachment at least 14 days before trial, may put on witnesses, and may defend in person and through counsel. If the judge refuses to show up, the Senate can hear the evidence and rule anyway.

Article 39 caps the punishment. An impeachment conviction removes the judge and can bar them from future state office, and nothing more. Prison, if the conduct was criminal, is a separate courtroom’s business.

Now the track record. In 242 years under this constitution, New Hampshire has impeached two judges. In 1790 the House impeached Supreme Court Judge Woodbury Langdon, accused of neglecting his duties on the bench; he resigned before the Senate could try him. The second case took 210 more years.

On July 12, 2000, the House voted 253-95 to impeach Chief Justice David Brock on four articles: a 1987 phone call to a lower-court judge about a pending case, communications with fellow justices over who would hear Justice Stephen Thayer’s own divorce appeal, a practice of letting recused justices comment on cases they were barred from deciding, and lying to House investigators. Thayer himself had already resigned that March in an agreement with the attorney general that headed off prosecution. The Senate tried Brock from September 18 to October 10, 2000, and first settled a question the constitution leaves open, deciding that conviction would require a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority. Brock was acquitted on every article. Senator Burt Cohen summed up the majority’s view: “Poor judgment is not enough.”

The Brock fight did not come out of nowhere. Historians of the episode trace much of the legislature’s fury to the court’s Claremont school-funding rulings, which ordered the state to fund an adequate education and enraged lawmakers who saw judges writing tax policy. That fight over who pays for schools is still running a quarter century later. The impeachment it helped ignite removed nobody.

The other door: the bill of address

Article 73 opens with the tenure rule: judicial officers, once appointed and sworn, hold office during good behavior. Then it describes the second removal tool. The governor, with the consent of the Executive Council, may remove any commissioned officer “for reasonable cause” upon the address of both houses of the legislature. Three conditions attach. The cause must be stated fully and substantially in the address itself. It cannot be a cause that would support impeachment, which keeps the two tracks separate by design: serious offenses go to a Senate trial, lesser cause goes by address. And the officer must get a chance to be heard in their own defense before a joint committee of both houses, a safeguard the voters wrote in when they amended the article in 1966.

On paper the address is the easier road: it needs no Senate trial and no two-thirds vote. New Hampshire’s early legislatures knew it, and a New Hampshire Bar Association history published this summer describes how thoroughly they abused it: 19th-century majorities would address the entire bench out of office or simply abolish a court, create a successor, and stock it with their own people, a cycle that repeated into the Jacksonian era until the courts began drawing separation-of-powers lines, starting with Merrill v. Sherburne in 1818. The modern era has been the opposite story. The address survives in the text, gets threatened in floor speeches, and has removed no judge in living memory.

The clock that never misses

Part II, Article 78 has done more to clear New Hampshire benches than every impeachment and address combined. Adopted in 1792, it says no person shall hold the office of judge of any court after reaching age 70. The article allows no exceptions and no finishing out the year.

Voters just reaffirmed it. In November 2024, a legislatively referred amendment known as CACR 6 asked whether to raise the judicial retirement age to 75. It had cleared the House 321-27 and the Senate 22-1, and its prime sponsor, Windham Rep. Bob Lynn, knew the stakes personally: he was chief justice of the Supreme Court when the clock forced him out at 70. The Concord Monitor reported the measure drew about 65.5 percent support, roughly 452,000 votes to 237,000 by the Secretary of State’s unofficial count, and still failed, because constitutional amendments need two-thirds. The Monitor noted the immediate consequence: two of the five sitting Supreme Court justices would hit the limit in 2026.

Who watches the bench in between

Everything short of removal belongs to the judiciary itself. New Hampshire adopted a code of judicial conduct in 1973, among the first states to do so, and since 1977 the Supreme Court has run judicial discipline through the Judicial Conduct Committee. The code lives in Supreme Court Rule 38, the committee in Rule 39, and its procedures in Rule 40. The JCC has eleven members and eleven alternates, and under Rule 39 six of those eleven seats belong to members of the public, so laypeople outnumber the judges on the panel that judges judges. The committee is structurally independent of the court system, with its own Portsmouth office, its own budget, and its own executive director.

Its powers have a hard ceiling. The JCC can dismiss a complaint, resolve it informally, issue a reprimand, or recommend that the Supreme Court impose formal discipline. It cannot remove anyone. Neither can the Supreme Court, for that matter: the chief justice has been the administrative head of all the courts since Article 73-a was added in 1978, and the state’s law library notes the court asserted an inherent power to suspend a sitting judge as far back as the Mussman case in 1972, but stripping a judicial commission still belongs only to the elected branches through impeachment or address. The court also runs a performance evaluation program that reviews every trial judge at least once every three years.

Filing a complaint has rules worth knowing before you write one. The person filing must have standing, meaning they were directly affected by the conduct or present when it happened. The complaint must be sworn under penalty of perjury. Formal disciplinary proceedings require a report filed within two years of the alleged misconduct. And the committee is blunt about its jurisdiction: a complaint that amounts to disagreement with a judge’s ruling is not a misconduct complaint. The remedy for a wrong ruling is an appeal, not a tribunal.

The system just took a live test

To see how these tools perform under pressure, look at the past two years. In June 2024, Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi arranged a private meeting with then-Gov. Chris Sununu while her husband, state ports director Geno Marconi, was under criminal investigation. She was placed on paid leave that July, and in October 2024 a Merrimack County grand jury indicted her on two felonies and five misdemeanors for allegedly trying to influence the investigation, a prosecution of a sitting justice the Boston Globe described as history-making. Sununu, for his part, told state investigators he heard no request for help and saw nothing illegal in the conversation.

The case never reached a jury. On October 7, 2025, Hantz Marconi pleaded no contest to a single new charge, criminal solicitation of misuse of position, a class B misdemeanor. She was found guilty, fined $1,200, and every original count was dropped. She admitted no guilt, conceding only that the state had the evidence to convict. A specially convened judicial panel then ruled the offense was not a “serious crime” under attorney discipline rules, restored her law license, and cleared her to return to the bench, which she did within days. Attorney General John Formella said publicly that the return surprised and disappointed him. On November 14, 2025, she reversed course and stopped hearing cases. On February 12, 2026, she turned 70, and Article 78 did what no other mechanism had: it ended her tenure, with a pension InDepthNH reported at about $111,000 a year. Her husband pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and resigned his post.

Notice what never happened. No impeachment moved; House Judiciary Chairman Bob Lynn told reporters in 2024 that lawmakers should let the criminal case run its course first. No bill of address advanced. The one process still standing is the JCC, and it outlasted her seat. In February the committee announced its investigation would continue despite her retirement, citing the Thayer precedent that it keeps jurisdiction over conduct committed in office. This month it filed two formal misconduct charges, alleging she broke the law and failed to avoid the appearance of impropriety, with a three-day public hearing set for December.

The court she left is under strain of its own. Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald has faced scrutiny, first reported by the Union Leader, over a payout of roughly $50,000 to his former chief of staff; the four other justices issued a joint statement saying every personnel decision in the matter was made collectively by the full court. Days before the JCC charges against Hantz Marconi were announced, the court said MacDonald would take an immediate medical leave of absence, disclosing nothing further. House Republican leaders say judicial accountability legislation is coming in 2026. Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney put it this way: “We will come up with different plans for different judges.”

What removal is not for

One boundary runs through all of this. None of these tools exists to punish a ruling. The address clause bars its use for anything impeachable, the JCC refuses complaints that are appeals in disguise, and Part I, Article 35 states the premise of the whole design: citizens are entitled to judges as impartial as human nature allows, which is why their pay is set by standing law and their tenure does not depend on pleasing anyone. If a judge got the law wrong, the remedy is the appellate docket.

So here is the honest summary of who oversees New Hampshire judges. The removal power belongs to the elected branches, which have started the process twice in 242 years and finished it never. Day-to-day discipline belongs to a committee the Supreme Court created, whose strongest independent weapon is a reprimand. And the one check that has never once failed is the calendar. Whether that balance protects judicial independence or shelters the bench from consequences is the argument the State House is about to have. The December hearing on a retired justice will be a good place to watch it start.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources named in the fact-check table before publication, with the constitutional text read in full. Rows marked ATTRIBUTED rest on the named news outlets and reference works rather than an original record. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.