Nh General Court

Telling the truth is legal again in N.H.

In 2009, Rockingham County Sheriff Dan Linehan and Deputy Sheriff Mark Peirce resigned while under investigation for allegedly leaking to the media information about sheriff candidate David Lovejoy's criminal record.

Immediately following their resignations Lovejoy sued Linehan, Peirce and a Portsmouth Herald reporter, who published a story that revealed Lovejoy had a domestic assault conviction that had subsequently been annulled. Lovejoy argued that despite the fact he was campaigning to be the county's top law enforcement officer the public had no right to know about his domestic assault conviction because he had the case annulled.

Lovejoy was able to do all this mischief because the state's annulment laws were muddled at best and gave the impression that simply speaking or publishing information about an annulled record was a criminal misdemeanor.

This past Tuesday, Gov. John Lynch signed significant reforms of the state's annulment statute into law. Under the new law journalists, and by extension members of the public, are now protected from civil and criminal penalties for reporting someone's criminal record, regardless of whether they have worked the legal system to have the case annulled. News organizations and others are also no longer required to remove stories or police logs from their online archives if a case is annulled. In New Hampshire, telling the truth is once again fully legal.

These changes were also supported by the New Hampshire attorney general and the court system, because prosecutors and court workers were just as confused as the rest of us about what they could and could not reveal about annulled cases.

There are many legislators who deserve credit for this much improved law. Former Portsmouth state representatives Jim Splaine and Paul McEachern co-sponsored a bill in 2009 that created a committee to study the bill in an effort to balance the real need for people who commit minor crimes to make a fresh start with the public's right to know.

The House Criminal Justice and Safety Committee held excellent hearings in April 2009 and asked probing questions to get to the heart of the issue. Rep. Laura Pantelakos, D-Portsmouth, and then-Rep. Renny Cushing, D-Hampton, asked particularly insightful questions. The Senate Judiciary Committee held peremptory hearings as well but seemed more interested in bills to decriminalize marijuana than this piece of legislation supported by all the state's media outlets, its courts and attorney general. Fortunately, the bill suffered benign neglect at the Senate's hands and the study committee was approved.

News and information for fans of the NH AFL-CIO: Unions file ...

The employee contribution increase, between 2 and 2.5 percentage points for all public workers, was included in a Republican reform plan that officially became law yesterday. The wide-ranging plan seeks to soften the burden on public employers, such as towns and school districts, that will be caused by the elimination of the state's 25 percent contribution to their retirement costs.

New Hampshire General Court, Members of the New Hampshire General Court, Robert Bob J. Giuda, New Hampshire Senate

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