Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

What the New Hampshire Attorney General Does — and Who Checks the Work

Every homicide prosecution, every police deadly-force review, every consumer complaint, and the state’s own transparency manual run through one unelected office in Concord.

Jobs in the Law is a Granite State Report series on the people who do the law’s work in New Hampshire. The series opened inside the judge’s job. This entry maps the office that argues against those judges, advises the agencies they rule on, and once prosecuted one of them.

New Hampshire prosecutes every murder in the state from one office in Concord, and the person who runs it has never appeared on a ballot. The same office decides whether a police officer who shot someone will face charges, defends the state when you sue it, takes the complaint when a contractor stiffs you, audits the charity that runs your food pantry, and wrote the manual your select board reads before it answers or denies your records request.

The Attorney General of New Hampshire is the state’s chief legal officer and its chief law enforcement officer, and heads the Department of Justice at 1 Granite Place South. This explainer maps the office’s day-to-day work and the checks that sit on top of it.

Full disclosure: Granite State Report has pending Right-to-Know correspondence with the New Hampshire Department of Justice, the agency this explainer covers. That matter is separate from this piece and played no role in its preparation.

An office the voters never touch

Forty-three states elect their attorney general. New Hampshire is one of five where the governor appoints one — the others are Alaska, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Wyoming — and it stands alone among them in routing confirmation through an elected five-member Executive Council rather than a legislature.

Part II, Article 46 of the state constitution puts the nomination in the governor’s hands, subject to the council’s consent. RSA 21-M:3 sets the term at four years and requires the appointee to be a member of the New Hampshire bar, qualified by education and experience. Four years is two more than a governor serves, so an attorney general’s term is built to straddle administrations.

The current occupant is John M. Formella, a Republican from Portsmouth who came to the job in April 2021 from the post of Governor Chris Sununu’s legal counsel. His path to a second term shows the appointment machinery in motion. His first term expired March 31, 2025. Governor Kelly Ayotte, herself a former attorney general, declined to renominate him at first and kept him in holdover status while she reviewed the department. She renominated him on August 26, 2025, and the Executive Council confirmed him to a second four-year term on September 17, 2025.

Murder cases belong to Concord

RSA 7:6 makes the attorney general the state’s lawyer in every supreme court case in which the state has an interest, and hands the office the prosecution of crimes punishable by death or life imprisonment. In practice that means homicide: every murder case in New Hampshire is an Attorney General’s Office case, tried by Concord prosecutors in county courthouses. County attorneys carry the rest of the criminal docket, and RSA 7:34 places each of them “under the direction of the attorney general.”

Inside the department, the Criminal Justice Bureau carries that load. Its Homicide Prosecution Unit takes murder cases from the investigation stage through trial. A Cold Case Unit works unsolved killings; in 2026 it announced the resolution of its renewed investigation into the 2007 murder of Carrie Hicks in Acworth, a case that had sat open for nearly two decades. A Drug Prosecution Unit and a Public Integrity and White-Collar Crime Unit handle trafficking cases and criminal wrongdoing by state officials, including state law enforcement officers. The department’s own criminal justice investigators carry statewide police powers under RSA 21-M:3. And the Youth Development Center scandal, in which roughly 1,300 former detainees have alleged abuse at state facilities per NHPR, has its own unit on the department’s organization chart.

When police shoot, the attorney general grades the shooting

When a New Hampshire police officer uses deadly force, the Attorney General’s Office investigates and decides whether the force was legally justified. The office announces its determination and, once related criminal cases resolve, publishes a final report naming the officers and walking through the evidence. The files accumulate steadily: in 2026 alone the office has issued findings on incidents in Manchester, Pelham, Charlestown, Hampstead, Keene, and Raymond. The Raymond case shows the tempo: a man fired a rifle at police on April 4, 2026, wounding a Nottingham officer, and within weeks the office had disclosed the responding officers’ names and issued a preliminary finding that their return fire was justified, with a full report to follow once the evidence review ends. The pattern in the office’s findings is consistent. The Concord Monitor reported in May 2026 that the office has found officers’ use of deadly force legally justified in nearly every case over at least the past three years.

That work sits next to a structural fact worth stating plainly. The office that judges police shootings is the same office whose stated mission includes supervising and leading New Hampshire law enforcement, and the same office that prosecutes officers on the rare occasions charges follow. New Hampshire concentrates the whole cycle in one building.

The state’s law firm

The criminal docket is the loud half of the job. The quiet half is that the Department of Justice is state government’s law firm. RSA 21-M:2 assigns it four general functions: advising and representing the state and its executive agencies in all civil legal matters, supervising and conducting criminal investigations and prosecutions, enforcing the state’s consumer protection and antitrust laws, and assisting the agencies that enforce environmental law. Sue a state agency, and DOJ lawyers file the answer. A contract dispute, a constitutional challenge to a new statute, the defense of a trooper accused of misconduct — the captions differ, but the counsel table is the same.

The scale of that civil work is on display in the biggest case the office has. On August 14 the department filed a 125-page brief with the state Supreme Court in its appeal of the Rand school-funding decision, arguing that the Claremont rulings of the 1990s — the twin decisions holding that the state has a constitutional duty to provide and pay for an adequate education, and that a funding system built on wildly uneven local property taxes is unconstitutional — should be overturned in whole or in part, per InDepthNH’s account of the filing. The brief calls the decisions poorly reasoned and argues school funding is a political question for legislators, not judges. As a fallback, the state asks the court to count local property taxes toward the state’s own funding obligation. Zack Sheehan of the New Hampshire School Funding Fairness Project answered that the state is “asking the Court to make the school funding problem harder to challenge” instead of solving it. Oral argument is expected by year’s end before a shorthanded bench: Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald is on medical leave, and the four remaining justices declined the plaintiffs’ request that they step aside. Granite State Report has covered the school-funding fight since the ConVal ruling; the state now wants the foundation under all of it gone.

The office’s internal structure has independence written into statute. The deputy attorney general serves a fixed four-year term. Assistant attorneys general are appointed to five-year terms and can be removed only through the formal process in RSA 4:1, not at the attorney general’s pleasure and not at the governor’s. An Office of the Solicitor General handles appellate work. And under RSA 7:9, the governor and council can direct the attorney general to appear in a proceeding to protect the state’s interests, one of the few levers the corner office holds between appointments.

The multistate desk

A share of the job happens with forty-nine other offices on the letterhead. Formella served as president of the National Association of Attorneys General in 2025, and in December his peers gave him the association’s Kelley-Wyman Memorial Award — a prize with a New Hampshire pedigree, established by former New Hampshire attorney general Louis Wyman in memory of his father. The coalition work has run straight through 2026. In July the office joined 48 fellow attorneys general pressing the Federal Communications Commission to cut scammers off from legitimate phone numbers, citing 55.4 million robocalls placed to the 603 area code in 2026 so far. In August it signed a letter from 35 states urging Congress to keep new federal hemp rules on schedule, per the Concord Monitor’s count. In December 2025 Formella co-led a coalition of 47 attorneys general asking Congress for security funding for federal judges. None of these letters binds anyone. They are how a small state’s office puts weight behind positions it could never litigate alone.

Where citizens meet the office

Most Granite Staters will never sit in a courtroom across from a DOJ prosecutor. They meet the office through its complaint windows. The Consumer Protection and Antitrust Bureau takes consumer complaints and enforces the state’s consumer protection and antitrust laws; its Consumer Protection Hotline is 1-888-468-4454. The Charitable Trusts Unit, run by the Director of Charitable Trusts — a position written into the same statutory chapter as the attorney general itself — oversees New Hampshire’s nonprofits, which file annual reports with the unit under RSA 7:28. The unit’s reach showed in May, when North Country Healthcare agreed to governance changes the office required after a charitable-trust review, per InDepthNH.

The Medicaid Fraud Control Unit investigates and prosecutes fraud by health care providers who bill Medicaid, along with abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation of residents in health care facilities. A Civil Rights Unit brings enforcement actions under state civil rights law. An Elder Abuse and Financial Exploitation Unit and a Data Privacy Unit round out the public-protection side. The privacy unit enforces the New Hampshire Data Privacy Act, RSA 507-H, with civil penalties up to $10,000 per violation and criminal fines up to $100,000. And the Election Law Unit polices campaigns and voting. It was this office that identified the source of the AI-generated robocalls impersonating President Biden before the January 2024 presidential primary.

Two more pieces of the department surprise people. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the operation that performs autopsies and rules on causes of death, sits inside the Department of Justice, with assistant deputy medical examiners appointed under RSA 21-M:3. And the Office of Victim/Witness Assistance, created by the Legislature in 1987, walks victims and witnesses through the cases the office prosecutes, alongside a Victims’ Compensation Program.

The office that wrote the transparency manual

For readers of this outlet, one function matters most. The Attorney General’s Office writes the state’s operating manual for RSA 91-A, the Right-to-Know Law.

In March 2024, during Sunshine Week, the office published a new edition of the Attorney General’s Memorandum on New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law, its first full update since 2015, covering 27 statutory amendments and 17 new court decisions across roughly 140 pages. Announcing it, the office put its philosophy in one line: “the people of the State of New Hampshire have the right to know.” Municipalities and courts treat the memorandum as the reference text; the New Hampshire Municipal Association has described a superior court citing it throughout one 52-page Right-to-Know decision.

The same office sits on the government’s side of records fights. DOJ lawyers advise state agencies on what to withhold and defend those agencies when requesters sue. The author of the manual is also, in state-agency cases, the defense counsel.

Enforcement is where the system thins out. The Legislature created a Right-to-Know Ombudsman in 2022 as a $25 alternative to suing, and that office decided complaints for two and a half years. Then the 2025 state budget cut its funding from roughly $105,000 to $30,000. The first ombudsman, Thomas Kehr, resigned; the seat has been vacant since July 1, 2025; the cases pending when the cuts hit were dismissed; and as of March 2026, per the Concord Monitor, no one had applied for the job. Governor Ayotte had made no nomination as of the New Hampshire Bulletin’s reporting in July 2026. Until that changes, a records dispute has exactly one road: a petition in superior court under RSA 91-A:7. Granite State Report walked that empty chair in a July report and published a working guide to RSA 91-A for requesters going it alone.

Who checks the checker

The formal checks are the ones built into the appointment: a governor who can decline to renominate, a five-member council that can vote no, courts that can reverse the office’s positions, and a Legislature that writes its budget. The 2025 reconfirmation showed several of them in motion. Survivors of abuse at the former Youth Development Center wrote to the Executive Council in September 2025 urging it to reject Formella’s reappointment, arguing his office had put the state’s interests ahead of victims in the operation of the YDC settlement fund, per NHPR and the Valley News. Formella publicly defended his department’s work, and Ayotte said months of working with him had left her impressed. The council confirmed him, and the dispute moved to the courts: survivors sued the state in 2025 over changes to the settlement fund’s administration, per the Valley News.

The sharpest recent test of the office’s independence ran straight at the judiciary. In October 2024 a Merrimack County grand jury indicted Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi, a sitting associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, on two felonies and five misdemeanors over what prosecutors described as her attempt to interfere with the department’s investigation of her husband, then the state’s ports director. The department’s Public Integrity Unit brought the case. A year later she entered a no-contest plea and was found guilty of one class B misdemeanor, criminal solicitation of misuse of position, and paid a $1,200 fine; prosecutors agreed in the plea that her conduct was not a “serious crime,” and she disputed the state’s characterization of her actions throughout. She retired from the bench in February 2026 on her 70th birthday, the mandatory retirement age this series covered in the judge’s job, and the Judicial Conduct Committee filed misconduct charges against her this month, per the Boston Globe. Whatever else the case shows, it settled one question about the office: the department that answers to no ballot was willing to indict a justice of the court that reviews its work.

The office’s second term runs on the same four-year clock that has governed it since 1985. Between confirmations, the checks are the quieter ones: the council that reviews its work, the judges who read its briefs, and the citizens who file the records requests it wrote the manual for.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every load-bearing claim above was checked against the sources named in the fact-check table before publication; statutes were read in the current Revised Statutes Annotated text. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when. InDepthNH, Aug. 17, 2026 (Rand appeal brief); NH DOJ announcements: Hantz Marconi indictment (Oct. 2024) and plea (Oct. 2025), robocall coalition (July 9, 2026), Data Privacy Unit, Kelley-Wyman award (Dec. 16, 2025), hemp coalition (Aug. 5, 2026), judicial security coalition (Dec. 11, 2025), Cold Case Unit resolution (Carrie Hicks); Boston Globe, Aug. 6, 2026; Union Leader, Feb. 2026; InDepthNH, May 28, 2026; Concord Monitor, Aug. 6, 2026.