Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Honesty Penalty: New Hampshire Still Punishes the People Who Tell the Truth

The Supreme Court says cannabis use alone can’t make a gun owner a felon. The gun-counter form, the statute deputizing every neighbor, and a $239 million abuse ledger never got the memo.

Forty-seven years ago this month, New Hampshire deputized everybody. On August 22, 1979, RSA 169-C:29 took effect and made every adult in the state a mandatory reporter of suspected child abuse or neglect — the physician, the teacher, the priest, and, in its sweep-up clause, “any other person having reason to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected.” No proof required, only suspicion. The caller can stay anonymous. The call can follow its target for life.

Full disclosure: the editor has pending public-records matters with New Hampshire law enforcement, including one involving retention of a firearm, and personal contact with the reporting systems described here. This article is reported from statutes, court opinions, agency records, and published sources, not from any pending matter.

Two months ago, the United States Supreme Court looked at the other half of this machinery and flinched. In United States v. Hemani, decided June 18, all nine justices agreed the government could not prosecute a Texas man as a felon for keeping a gun at home while using marijuana. His honesty was the entire case. Agents searching his family’s house for something else asked; he answered that he smoked about every other day; six months later the admission became the indictment.

Put the two dates side by side and you have the argument. The legal architecture around a New Hampshire family — statehouse and Congress, clinic and gun counter — is engineered to punish the person who discloses and reward the person who conceals. The Court just sawed off one branch. The rest still stands, and much of it runs through Concord.

The form outlived the law

Start at the gun counter. Hemani is narrow. The Court did not strike 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the 1968 ban on gun possession by drug users. It held that prosecuting a man for marijuana use alone, absent any claim of danger or misuse, cannot survive the Second Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch allowed that “drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix” and then dismantled the government’s theory that every regular user is heir to the founding era’s disarmable drunkards — people too far gone to manage their own affairs.

Now walk into any licensed dealer. ATF Form 4473, the record every buyer signs, still asks whether the buyer unlawfully uses marijuana or another controlled substance, and still warns that such use “remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized” by your state. Answer yes and the dealer must stop the sale. Answer no while using and you have committed a federal felony. After Hemani the possession offense is dead for the ordinary user; the paperwork survives, and its only guaranteed consequence lands on the person who tells the truth.

ATF knows. It posted a proposed rewrite softening the marijuana language on May 8; comments closed August 6. Two weeks on, the old form is still on the counter and the promised post-Hemani guidance has not landed. The enforcement record sharpens it: a Washington Post review cited by the U.S. Concealed Carry Association found that of roughly 112,000 federal purchase denials in 2017, twelve people were prosecuted. The machine denies honest applicants at scale and pursues liars almost never.

The New Hampshire stakes are concrete. Possession of up to three-quarters of an ounce has been a $100 civil violation here since 2017. Roughly 15,000 patients are in the state’s Therapeutic Cannabis Program. In April, a U.S. Justice Department order moved state-regulated medical cannabis to Schedule III. The House passed legalization 208-135 in January; the Senate tabled it in February; and in June Gov. Kelly Ayotte vetoed even a modest bipartisan dispensary-greenhouse bill, writing, “I do not support expanding the cultivation of marijuana in our state.” So the honest patient at a gun counter still chooses between medicine and a right the Supreme Court just defended.

Everyone is a reporter

Now the statute with the August anniversary. RSA 169-C:29 lists two dozen professions, then erases the list with its final clause: every person with reason to suspect abuse or neglect must report it. The trigger is deliberately low. The Attorney General’s model protocol says a reporter needs only “reason to believe that something could have happened.” School policies statewide tell staff to resolve doubt in favor of calling. Refusing to report is itself legally dangerous; reporting in good faith is bulletproof.

Every protection runs one direction. RSA 169-C:31 gives good-faith reporters civil and criminal immunity. The Department of Health and Human Services tells callers in its own guidance that they can remain anonymous. Even privilege falls: RSA 169-C:32 abrogates privileged communication in these cases. The person reported on gets none of this. They get an assessment, a case file, and, if the department finds abuse or neglect by a preponderance of the evidence, a founded finding with written notice and an appeal clock already running.

Here is the part accused parents chronically misunderstand: a report is an accusation, and the system’s own rules say so. An anonymous call proves nothing. An assessment is not a verdict. A founded determination requires that preponderance standard, carries a right of appeal to the department’s Administrative Appeals Unit, and only then places a name on the confidential Central Registry, where, under department policy citing RSA 169-C:35, III, founded reports stay indefinitely, with an expungement petition available after one year. No written finding in your mailbox means nothing has been determined about you, whatever the call felt like.

The asymmetry remains. The accused carries the file; the caller carries nothing, not even a name in the record the accused can see. The legislature made that choice in 1979 and renews it every session; it deserves to be defended out loud rather than assumed.

What puts a name in the FBI’s index, and what does not

The angriest folk belief in this corner of the law holds that a child-protection report can strip your gun rights, that DCYF feeds the FBI. It does not. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System denies buyers in the federal prohibitor categories: felony conviction, fugitive status, the drug-user provision, mental-health adjudication or involuntary commitment, certain protective orders, domestic-violence misdemeanors.

Federal law defines which records establish the drug prohibitor, and they are criminal-history records. Under the 2007 NICS Improvement Amendments Act, that means multiple possession arrests inside five years with the latest inside a year, or a qualifying conviction. The mental-health prohibitor requires a formal adjudication or an involuntary commitment; a voluntary therapy appointment is not one, and a substance-use screening is not one. Nowhere in the scheme is there a category for state child-protection reports, founded or unfounded. A DCYF assessment cannot make anyone a prohibited person; no rule exists to carry it there. A denial at a dealer traces to a short, knowable federal list: an arrest, a conviction, a commitment, an order, or the buyer’s own answers. Anger at the right target starts with pulling the actual record.

Confidential, with a trapdoor

Federal drug-treatment confidentiality law exists, by the government’s own account, so a person who seeks help is “not made more vulnerable” than one who never walks in the door. That is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration describing 42 CFR Part 2, a candid admission that the incentive problem is old and real.

The doors in the wall sit exactly where a struggling parent stands. HIPAA lets providers disclose protected health information to child-protection authorities, 45 CFR 164.512(b)(1)(ii). Part 2’s consent wall has a child-abuse-reporting exception, and 42 CFR 2.63 lets a court open even confidential treatment communications where suspected child abuse or neglect is in play. Stack the universal reporting duty on top and every clinical room in the state has RSA 169-C:29 in the corner. An honest sentence on an intake form — I smoke sometimes, I lost my temper — can lawfully travel into a chart, then into a report the clinician may be obligated to make, then into a file its subject will never fully trace. None of that requires the sentence to prove anything.

Reporting clinicians are not the villains: the statute gives them no discretion and the penalty structure runs one way. The design is the defendant, and the design belongs to the legislature.

Where the taken children went

Every reporting funnel points somewhere. For three generations the destination for children removed from New Hampshire homes was the Youth Development Center in Manchester, renamed the Sununu Youth Services Center in 2006. What happened inside is no longer seriously contested: the state is paying for it.

The state’s own claims administration reported in May: 425 abuse claims resolved for $239.3 million, an average award of $563,054, and a fund balance already $12.5 million in the red before deciding the claims still in the queue. When founding administrator John Broderick, a former chief justice, was pushed out last summer, he left more than 1,530 pending claims that their filers value at $1.8 billion. Three former staffers have been convicted. The one civil case to reach a jury, David Meehan’s, ended in a $38 million verdict in 2024 the Attorney General’s office is still fighting to shrink to $475,000 under the state liability cap.

The 2026 legislature’s contribution: voting to send proceeds from the Manchester property’s sale to the General Fund rather than the victims’ settlement fund. During debate, Rep. Ken Weyler of Pembroke said there is “no end in sight,” blaming what he called lies about a facility the state’s own fund has paid $239 million over. Most claims predate the 2006 rebuild, the claim window closed in June 2025, and a smaller replacement is being built. The ledger is still the point. When New Hampshire tells a parent that disclosure is safe and removal means protection, the bill for what protection looked like sits in Concord while the legislature routes the sale money elsewhere.

The math a desperate person does

Assemble the machine and run a person through it. A parent under strain, using a substance seventy percent of neighbors want legalized, considers a therapist, and the reporting statute is in the room. Considers candor with a doctor, and the chart is reachable and privilege is abrogated. Considers buying a firearm legally, and the form converts honesty into denial and dishonesty into a felony. Every truthful act generates a record; every record has a downstream use; concealment generates nothing. Some conclude the street corner is safer than the clinic and the private sale safer than the licensed dealer, and the statutes, as written, agree with them.

Hemani himself is the proof of concept. He cooperated, surrendered the gun, volunteered his use, and the admission was the whole prosecution. It took nine justices to call that what it was. The 47-year-old statute, the unfixed form, and the registry that keeps names indefinitely have not had their Hemani yet.

What honesty should cost

Honesty will always cost something; the question is whether government stacks the price. The fixes are plain. ATF can finalize the form it drafted. Congress can conform the drug-user ban to the ruling instead of leaving a dead-letter felony on the books. Concord can pass the bills filed this session to protect therapeutic-cannabis patients’ firearm rights, stop treating a $100 civil violation as a character verdict, and send the Manchester sale money where the harm happened. None of that requires trusting drugs or doubting child protection, only noticing which behavior the statutes tax. The answer is disclosure.

A state that owes $239 million for what happened to children in its own custody has forfeited the presumption that its systems deserve more benefit of the doubt than the people who tell them the truth. Honesty is the input every one of these systems runs on, from the intake form to the federal form to the sworn petition. New Hampshire should stop billing for it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources in the fact-check table before publication. YDC Claims Administration figures run through May 31, 2026; the pending-claim count is as reported by the fund’s outgoing administrator in July 2025. ATF’s proposed revision of Form 4473 had not been finalized as of publication. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.