Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

How to Annul a Criminal Record in New Hampshire, and Why the Police File Never Goes Away

Annulment costs about $350, takes months, and does real work. It also leaves an arrest report in your town’s police department that New Hampshire law says must be kept permanently.

Disclosure: I file Right-to-Know requests with New Hampshire police agencies as part of this outlet’s work, and some of those requests are unresolved. That gives me a direct interest in the 2016 Supreme Court holding discussed below, which widened public access to police and prosecutor files. It cuts against the argument I make here about what people who seek an annulment are owed. Readers should weigh both.

The New Hampshire State Police say it on their own website, without apology. The criminal history file they keep has no expiration date. Nothing ages out. Nothing gets purged at ten years, or twenty, or when you die. The only exit is a court order, and the court order has a price.

That is where anyone thinking about annulment should start. Not with the forms. With the design. New Hampshire built a record system meant to hold everything, cut one narrow paid door out of it, and gave that door a name it does not live up to.

Annulment is real relief and worth having. It is also badly named. RSA 651:5 does not erase a criminal record. It seals the court file, pulls the entry out of the state and FBI criminal history that shows up on a background check, and lets you legally answer no when an employer asks. Everything else stays where it sits. The arrest report in your town’s police department is kept permanently under a separate statute. So is the prosecutor’s file. And when your annulment order reaches the arresting agency, its legal duty is to write annulled on the file, not to destroy it.

What the order buys you

Start with the part that works, because it is worth real money to a real person. After an annulment, RSA 651:5, X(f) limits what anyone may ask. On a job application, a license application, or the witness stand, you can be questioned only about a crime “that has not been annulled by a court.” You answer no. You are not lying, and no one can make you explain further.

The court file gets sealed under X(c), open only to you, your lawyer, a sentencing court, and law enforcement. Under X(d), the State Police strip the entry from the state repository and notify the federal system, which the agency says takes two to four weeks.

Then the provision almost nobody knows about. Since January 1, 2019, a case ending in dismissal, a nolle prosequi, or a not-guilty finding on every charge is annulled automatically thirty days later. No petition and no fee. If your case ended that way in the last seven years, it already happened, whether anyone told you or not.

What the state keeps

Read that list again. The Legislature assigned a shelf life to almost everything a town touches, down to airport fuel inspections at six months. For police arrest reports it wrote one word: permanently.

The annulment statute does not disturb any of it. RSA 651:5, X(e) tells the arresting and prosecuting agencies to identify the annulment in their files and electronic records. That is a label instruction. Paragraph XI(b) then preserves the right of law enforcement to keep arrest and conviction records outright, and to hand an annulled record to other officers for investigations, to defend a civil suit arising out of the arrest, or to the Police Standards and Training Council when it weighs whether someone is fit to wear a badge.

One more exception sits inside the promise. Paragraph X(a) says you are treated as if you had never been arrested, then adds that on any later conviction the judge may consider the annulled one at sentencing, and it still counts toward habitual offender status under RSA 259:39. The record is gone for your landlord. It is not gone for the man in the robe.

Then the Supreme Court opened the file

In 2016 the New Hampshire Supreme Court answered this directly, and the answer is not the one most people expect.

A Grafton County grand jury indicted a man on multiple felony counts. A jury acquitted him on all of them. He petitioned to annul the record of his arrest and prosecution, and in July 2014 the superior court granted it. While that petition was pending, Elizabeth Canner filed Right-to-Know requests with the Grafton County Attorney’s Office and the Hanover Police Department for the trial records and the department’s investigative file.

The county attorney asked the court whether annulment shut the door. It did not. In Grafton County Attorney’s Office v. Canner, 169 N.H. 319 (2016), the court held those records are “not categorically exempt from public inspection.” The annulment statute, it reasoned, is not the sort of law that triggers the Right-to-Know Law’s exemption for records another statute forbids releasing. The trial court had said it more bluntly on the way up: RSA 651:5, X(a) treats the person as if he was never arrested, not the record.

Be precise about the limit. The court did not declare annulled police files public. It sent the case back so the privacy and law enforcement exemptions in RSA 91-A:5, IV could be applied document by document. What it removed was the automatic shield.

I think the holding is right. Citizens need a way to audit how police and prosecutors used their power, and a defendant’s annulment should not be a switch that turns off review of the government. Now look from the other side of the counter. That man was acquitted by a jury, annulled by a judge, and his arrest file was still on the table.

The internet keeps its copy, and the statute says so

Two paragraphs at the end of RSA 651:5 settle what is left. Paragraph XVI shields a journalist from civil or criminal penalty for publishing that someone had an annulled record, including its contents, and for publishing it without mentioning the annulment when the reporter did not know. Paragraph XVII goes further: no person or entity, public or private, faces any penalty for refusing to remove or correct such a report, in any format.

It used to be a crime for a third party to disclose someone’s annulled record. That was paragraph XII. The Legislature repealed it in 2012.

So the newspaper archive stays up. The mugshot site stays up. The data broker who scraped your conviction in 2019 and sold it to a tenant screening company keeps its copy and owes you nothing. The uncomfortable part, said out loud: XVI protects me. That paragraph is why this outlet can report on an annulled case without a lawyer at my elbow. It is also the flattest statement in New Hampshire law that annulment was never erasure.

The process, and the price

Pull your own criminal history from the State Police Criminal Records Unit first, using the release authorization form, marking the purpose as annulment, and asking for the full and confidential version that shows arrests as well as convictions. It costs $25, must be notarized if you mail it, and nobody can collect it for you. Then pull your driving record from the DMV and case summaries from every court you were in, because not everything lands on the criminal history.

File a separate petition for each charge, in the court that disposed of it. The forms and a checklist sit on the New Hampshire Judicial Branch website under the Circuit Court district division.

Now the money. The Circuit Court fee schedule lists a petition to annul at $125, charged per court location. Corrections charges $100 to investigate you and report to the court. On a conviction, the State Police charge another $100, per court, to pull it from the state and federal systems. Add $25 for a fresh record check afterward to confirm the work got done. Roughly $350 for one conviction in one court, and it climbs from there.

Those waivers are a real protection and people should use them. They are also three separate showings to three separate offices, each with its own form, by a person the state has already decided is too poor to pay $325. The state cannot keep its own arithmetic straight either: the State Police annulment page opens by listing a $100 court filing fee, then tells you a few paragraphs down that the court will charge $125.

The waiting periods run from the day you finish every term of the sentence, including the last dollar of fines and restitution. One year for a violation, two for a class B misdemeanor, three for a class A misdemeanor, five for a class B felony, ten for a class A felony. Ten also for sexual assault under RSA 632-A:4, for felony indecent exposure or lewdness, and for misdemeanor domestic violence. Two years for a class A misdemeanor or felony drug offense under RSA 318-B:26, II.

Who never gets through the door

Some people are barred outright. Under paragraph V, no petition may be brought and no annulment granted for a violent crime as paragraph XIII defines it, for felony obstruction of justice, or for any offense that drew an extended term of imprisonment. That definition covers homicide, first degree assault, the felony sexual assaults, kidnapping and criminal restraint, class A felony arson, robbery, incest, and felony child sexual abuse image offenses.

Paragraph VI does the real damage. With more than one offense on your record, every one has to clear its own waiting period before you can file for any of them, and if a single entry is barred under paragraph V, the whole file is barred. One disqualifying conviction from 1997 locks everything you have done since. If a petition is denied, paragraph IV makes you wait three years to ask again.

595,600 files

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics counts what states hold. At the end of 2022, New Hampshire’s criminal history file contained 595,600 individual subjects. The state’s population is about 1.4 million.

Do not read that as a count of living Granite Staters with records. The file includes people arrested here who live elsewhere, and since it never expires, it includes the dead. What it measures is not how many of us are criminals. It is how much this state has kept, and how little ever leaves.

The consequences have been counted too. The Judicial Branch’s own law library, citing the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction, puts the number in New Hampshire law at a minimum of 1,108, reaching licensing, housing, residency, voting, and health care. Eleven hundred separate places a record can touch someone.

Where I come out

I was asked to argue that annulment is useless. I will not, because it is not, and writing it would be the exact overclaim I spend most of my time here calling out in other people. The automatic annulment for dismissals and acquittals costs nothing and works without anyone lifting a finger. The right to answer no on a job application changes lives.

What annulment is not is what its name promises, and the state has never gone out of its way to correct the misunderstanding. New Hampshire sells a $350 label change while letting people believe they bought an erasure. Nothing on the forms says otherwise. Nobody at the clerk’s window explains that the arrest report in the town’s basement is permanent under RSA 33-A:3-a, or that a decision from the state’s highest court left the police and prosecutor files exposed to a Right-to-Know request from anyone with a grudge and a stamp.

Watch what that costs. RSA 651:5-b lets you annul an arrest or conviction for three-quarters of an ounce of marijuana or less from before September 16, 2017. The Legislature decided that same year the conduct is a civil violation. Unlike RSA 651:5-a, the youth offense provision, which waives the filing fee on its face, 651:5-b says nothing about fees. You pay full freight to clear a charge the state stopped treating as a crime.

Four fixes, none exotic. Fold the Corrections and State Police charges into the court fee, so there is one payment and one waiver affidavit instead of three. Extend the automatic treatment already in paragraph II-a to violations and class B misdemeanors once the waiting period runs, since the state knows the disposition and the date and can let the computer do it. Waive the fee under 651:5-b the way the Legislature already did under 651:5-a. And give people what they cannot get now: a written right to ask their police department whether an annulled file has been released since the order, and a right to an answer.

That last one has no forum. The record is permanent and the sharing is invisible. The only place to fight about it is superior court, because the Right-to-Know Ombudsman’s chair has sat empty since Thomas Kehr resigned in July 2025 after lawmakers cut the job’s salary and budget from $105,000 to $30,000. As of early July, per the New Hampshire Bulletin, Gov. Kelly Ayotte had not nominated a replacement.

New Hampshire is entitled to keep its records. Police departments need arrest histories, and the Supreme Court was right that the public needs a way to see how a case was charged. What the state is not entitled to do is take $350 across a counter and let the person walk out believing the file is gone.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the primary source named in the fact-check table before publication; the statute text, the fee schedule, the agency pages, the federal data table, and the full text of the Canner opinion were each read for this piece. The 1,108 figure for collateral consequences is attributed to the New Hampshire Law Library’s research guide rather than counted independently, and the ombudsman vacancy is attributed to the New Hampshire Bulletin’s July 2026 reporting; both are marked accordingly. This article describes New Hampshire law and procedure for a general audience. It is journalism, not legal advice, and it is no substitute for a lawyer who can look at your actual record. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.