Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Two Tiers of Justice: Who New Hampshire Convicts, and Who Pays a Fine

Lawmakers had to override the governor to let prisoners show a judge new evidence of innocence. In the same twelve months, a Supreme Court justice charged with seven counts paid $1,200 and went back to work.

On August 19 the New Hampshire House voted 314 to 7 to override its own governor and give convicted prisoners a way to put new evidence of their innocence in front of a judge. The Senate followed, 18 to 6. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a former prosecutor and former attorney general, had vetoed the bill in July, arguing the state did not need a new path for defendants seeking a new trial.

Full disclosure: I have records requests pending with New Hampshire police agencies and I have used the Right-to-Know Law against several of the institutions discussed below. Readers should weigh this piece knowing that.

Until that vote, state law gave a convicted person three years to ask for a new trial, and then the door shut. If someone else confessed in year four, the door stayed shut. If a video surfaced in year nine showing a different person committing the crime, the door stayed shut. DNA was the only exception. New Hampshire was one of three states in the country running a hard clock like that, alongside Arkansas and Idaho.

Hold that next to what the same twelve months produced at the top of the system. A sitting justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, indicted on two felonies and five misdemeanors for trying to steer an investigation involving her husband, walked out of Merrimack County Superior Court with a $1,200 fine and her seat. New Hampshire runs two criminal justice systems. Both are legal. Which one processes you depends on how close you sit to the people running it.

Three years, then the door shuts

The National Registry of Exonerations counts 3,847 exonerations nationwide since 1989. New Hampshire has three. Prosecutors read that number as proof of a clean shop. Thomas Velardi, director of the Division of Public Protection at the Attorney General’s Office, told senators in April that wrongful conviction is “not a problem that exists in New Hampshire.”

There is a second reading of three. New Hampshire had built a system where proving innocence after three years was close to impossible, so almost nobody proved it. Cynthia Mousseau of the New England Innocence Project is the only full-time innocence attorney working in the state. She represents roughly 20 people who say they were convicted of things they did not do, and she has told reporters she keeps a waiting list she cannot reach. Come January she can finally file.

The floor speech that carried the override came from Rep. Robert Lynn of Windham, who spent his career on the bench and retired as chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Lynn had opposed earlier versions of the bill. This time he told the House, “We aren’t in the business here of letting innocent people stay in jail.”

What seven counts buys at the top

In October 2024 a Merrimack County grand jury indicted Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi on two class B felonies and five class A misdemeanors. Prosecutors alleged she arranged a private meeting with then-Gov. Chris Sununu and pressed him about the criminal investigation into her husband, port director Geno Marconi. The felonies carried up to seven years.

On October 7, 2025, the case ended in under fifteen minutes. She pleaded no contest to one class B misdemeanor. The fine was $1,200, plus $288 in court fees. No jail. Her attorney, Richard Guerriero, said she still disagrees with how the attorney general characterized her conduct and pleaded to avoid a trial that would have put other justices on the stand. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt.

The detail worth sitting with is inside the agreement. As part of the deal, prosecutors agreed to classify her conduct as not a “serious crime” under the attorney discipline rules. Two days later a panel of judges restored her law license without restriction. She was back hearing oral arguments the following week. Attorney General John Formella said publicly that her return was not a decision his office expected.

Her husband’s case closed the same way. Geno Marconi faced two felonies and four misdemeanors over allegations that he passed a Pease Development Authority board member’s confidential motor vehicle records to a third party and deleted voicemails during the investigation. He pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor violation of the Driver Privacy Act, took 30 days fully suspended and a $2,000 fine, and resigned. Prosecutors told reporters they had found other improprieties but did not believe they could win convictions on them.

Nobody here was above the law. That is the point. The law reached them, tapped them on the shoulder, took a few thousand dollars, and let them go home.

The machine pointed the other way

In March 2025 Ayotte signed House Bill 592, which took apart most of the state’s 2018 bail reform. It dropped the standard for holding someone before trial from clear and convincing evidence of dangerousness down to probable cause, one of the lowest bars in American law. It killed the magistrate system. According to a review by the ACLU of New Hampshire, only Virginia holds people on a standard that low.

On the law’s first anniversary this April, Ayotte and Formella held a press conference to celebrate the results. Formella reported the Coös County jail population up 50 percent in a year and Merrimack County up 30 percent. Then he explained, in an interview with the New Hampshire Bulletin, what detention does for his side of the table. Holding a defendant before trial gives prosecutors more bargaining room on a plea, he said, and moves cases faster, because “they don’t have any incentive to put a trial off.”

Read that against the Hantz Marconi file. Seven counts became one because she had lawyers, liberty, time, and a trial the state did not want to hold. A man sitting in Coös County because a judge found probable cause has none of those. The pressure that collapsed to $1,200 at the top lands as a felony plea at the bottom, and the difference is not the strength of the evidence.

Who cannot fight back

New Hampshire’s indigent defense system has been in open crisis for years. The Sixth Amendment Center, hired by the state’s own Judicial Council, found public defenders carrying caseloads far above the 70-open-case cap written into their contract, with roughly three-quarters of them over the line by mid-2021 and Dover attorneys reporting around 150 apiece. The New Hampshire Bar Association has documented defendants waiting months for a lawyer, some of them in custody the entire time. A staff attorney told the Sixth Amendment Center that the program puts the contract ahead of the client.

Who ends up in those cells is not random. The New Hampshire Center for Justice and Equity, drawing on Prison Policy Initiative data, reports that Black residents are about 7 percent of the state prison population and under 2 percent of the state. Hispanic residents are 6 percent of the prison population and 4 percent of the state. In county jails the gap widens: Black and Hispanic people together make up roughly a quarter of the jail population and under 6 percent of New Hampshire’s residents.

Those are the people the probable cause standard reaches first. They are also the people least able to hire the kind of counsel that turns seven counts into one.

The cases the state could not close

The Youth Development Center prosecutions are the clearest test the state has run on itself, and it is losing. Eleven former employees were charged with sexually assaulting children the state had locked up. Three have been found guilty. Five were acquitted, found not competent to stand trial, or had their charges dropped. More than 1,600 people have sued over abuse in New Hampshire’s juvenile facilities, according to the Union Leader.

In April, after two hung juries, the Attorney General’s Office dropped all charges against Victor Malavet, who had been accused of repeatedly raping a 16-year-old girl in state custody in 2001. He maintains his innocence. His accuser, Natasha Maunsell, testified in two public trials and settled her civil claim for $4.5 million. She told the Union Leader afterward: “It is never going to feel like justice, ever.”

On August 4, U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander asked the U.S. Attorney for New Hampshire to open a federal civil rights investigation into the facility, InDepthNH reported. A member of Congress asking Washington to look at a New Hampshire institution is a judgment about what the state’s own machinery has produced.

The pattern holds where police use deadly force. The Concord Monitor reported in May that in nearly every case over at least the past three years, the Attorney General’s Office has found officers legally justified. That office also decides what those reports say, when they come out, and what gets released.

“We would fix it ourselves”

The most revealing moment of the override came from Sen. Bill Gannon of Sandown, who had co-sponsored earlier versions of the innocence bill. He flipped to sustain the veto after the Attorney General’s Office assured him that prosecutors would reverse their own wrongful convictions if they found them. Sixteen of his colleagues voted the other way.

That assurance is the whole argument in one sentence. Trust the office that won the conviction to undo it. Velardi made the same case in April, telling senators that every prosecutor in the state carries an ethical duty to act on new evidence, and that New Hampshire’s low exoneration count reflects how prosecutors here operate. The Bulletin asked the Attorney General’s Office whether prosecutors might have some incentive not to announce that they had put an innocent person in prison. The office did not answer.

Self-policing is what a two-tier system looks like from the inside. It is not corruption and it does not require anyone to break a rule. It requires only that the people holding the discretion keep extending to each other the benefit of the doubt they charge the rest of the state for.

What would close the gap

Three things, none of which need a new agency.

Publish the disposition data. The Attorney General’s Office and the county attorneys already know how often felony indictments against public officials and law enforcement resolve down to misdemeanors, and how often the same happens for everyone else. Post those numbers annually, broken out by charge class and by whether the defendant held a government job, and nobody has to argue about a two-tier system again.

Move deadly force reviews out of house. The office that decides whether an officer is charged is the office that depends on those same officers as witnesses in every other case it brings. An independent reviewer with subpoena power would settle a question the current arrangement can only assert.

Fund indigent defense to the caseload caps the state already agreed to. New Hampshire wrote 70 open cases into its own contract and then let attorneys carry twice that. HB 592 pushed more people into cells where pleas get negotiated, and the Legislature never staffed the other side of the table. That is a budget line, not a philosophy.

The override was a real win. Come January, people who have spent decades saying they did not do it will finally get to hand a judge the reason. But it took a retired chief justice on the House floor and a bipartisan supermajority to win back something most Granite Staters assumed they already had. The rest of the gap is still open, and closing it does not require anyone in Concord to discover a new principle. It requires them to apply the one they already use every day on people who cannot afford a lawyer.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources named in the fact-check table before publication. Charges described as allegations remain allegations; a no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt, and Justice Hantz Marconi, through counsel, disputes the attorney general’s characterization of her conduct. Victor Malavet maintains his innocence and the charges against him were dropped. Geno Marconi’s guilty plea covered one misdemeanor count; the remaining charges were not prosecuted. Figures for the Youth Development Center prosecutions reflect reporting as of April 2026 and additional cases remain pending. This piece is journalism and commentary, not legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.