So Much Depends on Reputation

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Greene’s fifth law says guard your reputation with your life. New Hampshire built a registry where police reputations go when they crack, then spent decades guarding the registry’s secrecy instead. A murder case in Franklin started it. A lawsuit and a statute ended it.

Disclosure: Granite State Report has Right-to-Know matters pending with the Franklin Police Department, the agency whose 1989 case file begins the history told here. Those matters are unrelated to State v. Laurie and are not discussed in this piece. I file records requests as a routine part of reporting.

On April 21, 1989, Lucien Fogg was found in the woods near his Franklin home, beaten and stabbed to death. Carl Laurie was convicted of first-degree murder. The Supreme Court affirmed it. The case looked finished.

Then Laurie’s lawyers learned what the State had been holding: the employment records of the Franklin Police Department detective at the center of the investigation, records the court would later say “reflect negatively on the detective’s character and credibility.” The defense had never seen them. On January 20, 1995, the New Hampshire Supreme Court threw out the conviction and ordered a new trial. The case is State v. Laurie, 139 N.H. 325, and it gave its name to the most consequential reputation system in New Hampshire government.

Robert Greene’s fifth law of power says that so much depends on reputation that you should guard it with your life. This series has tested four of his laws against the New Hampshire record. On the fifth, the state built the test itself: a formal registry where police reputations go when they crack, and a twenty-five-year fight over who gets to see it.

The record says Greene is right about the stakes and wrong about the guarding. Reputation in New Hampshire turned out not to be an asset an officer polishes. It is a ledger somebody else keeps. And the only defense that ever worked, keeping the ledger secret, lost in court and then lost in statute.

Why one detective’s file built a machine

Laurie did not invent the underlying duty. Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), requires prosecutors to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, and Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972), extends that to material that could impeach a government witness. What Laurie added was a New Hampshire rule with teeth: once a defendant shows favorable evidence was knowingly withheld, the burden flips, and the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the missing evidence would not have changed the verdict.

That standard turned every officer’s credibility into structural material. A detective’s reputation for truthfulness is not a personal asset in that regime. It is load-bearing for every conviction the detective touches. Crack it, and cases fall.

So the institutions started keeping ledgers. County attorneys built what they called Laurie Lists, so prosecutors would know which officers carried disclosure problems into court. A 2004 Attorney General memorandum standardized the practice. In early 2017 the Attorney General centralized it into a single statewide document, the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule, a spreadsheet listing the officer, the employing department, the date of the incident and the category of conduct.

What lands an officer on it, under the state’s guidance: a deliberate lie in court or in a report, falsified records or evidence, excessive force, criminal conduct, and what the guidance calls egregious dereliction of duty, along with anything that “implicates an officer’s character for truthfulness.”

The state’s own lawyers understood exactly what the ledger meant. In Duchesne v. Hillsborough County Attorney, 167 N.H. 774 (2015), officers challenging their placement argued it damaged constitutionally protected interests, and the county’s side acknowledged at the trial court that “the Laurie list is considered a kind of a death list.”

Then the state guarded the ledger with its life

Here is where the fifth law stops being a metaphor.

For decades the list was secret. The public could learn how many names it held and the categories involved, but not who, and not where. A registry created because hidden credibility problems had overturned a murder conviction was itself hidden.

In 2018 the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism, five newspapers and the ACLU of New Hampshire sued for it under the Right-to-Know Law and Part I, Article 8 of the state constitution. The Attorney General’s office fought the release. Police unions fought it. The defense of the list’s secrecy ran on the same logic an individual would use: exposure is reputational death, therefore exposure must be prevented.

The arguments failed in a way readers of Part Four of this series will recognize. In October 2020 the Supreme Court held the schedule was not a “personnel file” protected by RSA 105:13-b, for a blunt reason: the Department of Justice maintains the list, and the Department of Justice does not employ the officers on it. Nor was it an exempt internal personnel practice. What remained was the privacy balancing test, and before that fight could finish, the Legislature ended it.

The first public version appeared at the end of 2021. On March 29, 2022, the Attorney General made public the names and departments of 174 current and former officers; 91 more entries stayed redacted while officers appealed or could not be located. When the bill was signed the previous August, reporting put the full ledger, including unresolved placements, at more than 270. The Department of Justice maintains the public list on its website and updates it as placements are added, resolved or removed.

What a public ledger did to the reputations in it

Greene treats reputation as something you defend by force of will. Watch what happened once the ledger opened.

Officers litigated. Three former state troopers who had admitted inflating their traffic-stop numbers, and had been disciplined for it decades earlier, went to court under the new statute to challenge their placement anyway. Other challenges have succeeded: a retired Keene officer came off the list after a fresh review of conduct from the 1980s, and the Supreme Court’s reading of the removal provisions positioned a retired Hanover officer, listed over a forged doctor’s note, for removal as well.

Notice what that is. It is not reputation guarded with anyone’s life. It is reputation as a contested public record, published by the state and revised in court, one file at a time. The list is not a verdict, and the state’s own guidance says placement is about potential impeachment material, not a finding that ends the question. Some names should come off, and some have.

Notice also what the public version does not contain. The schedule gives a name, a department, a date and a category. The records underneath it, the actual investigation files, still live behind the balancing test from Part Four, fought out request by request. The ledger’s cover is public. Its pages are still, mostly, not.

Where the fifth law fails

Greene’s advice assumes the reputation belongs to you. The Laurie system is a quarter-century demonstration that it does not. An officer’s credibility ledger is written by internal affairs, held by an employer, referred by a chief, maintained by the Attorney General, litigated by newspapers and published by statute. At no point in that chain does the officer hold the pen.

The same was true one level up. The Attorney General’s office guarded the list’s secrecy the way Greene tells an individual to guard a name, and it had institutional reasons: every name on the list is also a liability the system created, hired, and put on a witness stand. Exposure of the ledger was exposure of the institutions that filled it. The office lost anyway, because in a records state the guarding strategy has exactly one move, concealment, and concealment is a legal position that can be litigated. From 2018 to 2021 it was, and it failed in the courts and then in the House and Senate.

There is a harder edge to the institutional side, and it deserves a sentence of its own. The office that maintains the ledger is the same office whose prosecutions depend on the witnesses in it. Every referral the Department of Justice accepts makes the state’s own cases harder, and every referral it resists keeps a compromised witness usable. That is not an accusation of bad faith by anyone. It is a description of the table the Legislature set, and it is the strongest argument that the list needed outside eyes on it, which for twenty-five years it did not have.

That is the through-line this series keeps finding. Laws Three and Four scored low because the public had no working enforcement. Law Five scores higher for the inverse reason: this is the one fight where enforcement showed up on the public’s side, first as a lawsuit with six newsrooms behind it, then as a statute. The reputation system did not become honest on its own. It was made public over the sustained objection of everyone it described.

On August 31, 2020, the state’s Commission on Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency submitted the report that helped push the question into the Legislature’s lap. That date is worth marking for one reason: the list is public because people outside the system spent years forcing the issue, and for no other reason.

How to read the ledger yourself

The Exculpatory Evidence Schedule is on the Department of Justice’s website. It costs nothing to read. Three suggestions for reading it well.

Look up your town’s department, not a name. The useful civic question is not who is on the list. It is whether your department appears, how often, and in which categories. A cluster of entries from one era tells you something about supervision in that era.

Treat every entry as a claim, not a conviction. Placements have been challenged and reversed. The list is impeachment material, and the honest way to read it is the way a defense lawyer does: as a flag that a file exists, not as the file itself.

Ask your department one question in writing. What is its policy for referring officers to the schedule, and who decides? That policy is a governmental record. A department with a clear written answer is running the system. A department without one is hoping nobody asks. And if the answer that comes back is one of the three phrases from Part Four of this series, you already know what to send next: a written request that obligates a written, exemption-specific reply.

Next: Law 6, on courting attention, and what a New Hampshire primary proves about candidates who cannot be ignored.

Fact check

Editor’s note: This is commentary and analysis, not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer. No current or former officer is named in this piece, and placement on the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule is treated throughout as what the state’s guidance says it is: potential impeachment material, not a finding of guilt. Case outcomes are summarized from published opinions and opinion summaries. This piece quotes no part of Robert Greene’s book beyond the subject of Law 5. The GSR Power Index is an editorial rating, not data. Before relying on the schedule for any purpose, consult the current version on the Department of Justice’s website.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.