New Hampshire state law gives convicted prisoners three years to request a new trial. After that, they lose the right. With a narrow exception for DNA forensics, that’s true even if new evidence contradicting their guilt emerges.
If someone else confesses to the crime after three years, they can’t request a new trial. If previously undiscovered evidence of an alibi is uncovered after three years, they can’t request a new trial. If a video of someone else committing the crime is discovered after three years, they can’t request a new trial. In any of those circumstances, the wrongfully convicted prisoner’s only recourse is a pardon from the governor or the prosecutor vacating their own previous work.
New Hampshire lawmakers of both parties have been working to change that. This year, the House and Senate passed House Bill 1422, which allows inmates to ask a court to consider newly discovered evidence after the three-year deadline.
However, the bill hit a snag in the State House’s corner office last month. Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a former prosecutor who’s sought to position herself as a tough-on-crime public safety advocate, vetoed the legislation at the urging of local prosecutors who fear it’ll inspire a deluge of frivolous complaints and say it’s unnecessary.
This week, lawmakers will meet in Concord for a vote on whether to override Ayotte’s veto. If two-thirds in each chamber vote to override, New Hampshire prisoners who maintain their innocence based on new evidence will have a potential avenue to prove that innocence even after the deadline. If the veto is sustained, groups like the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit that works to overturn wrongful convictions, say innocent people will remain behind bars in New Hampshire.
“There shouldn’t be this arbitrary deadline when it comes to the innocent,” Winne Ye, a state policy advocate with the Innocence Project, said. “There are innocent people right now behind bars with no path forward because of these restrictions and this legislation would give them a chance to have their day in court.”
An outlier nationwide
New Hampshire is one of only three states with absolute deadlines — alongside Arkansas and Idaho — for convicts introducing new evidence.
New Hampshire also stands out for its post-conviction outcomes. As of Friday, there have been 3,847 exonerations across the United States since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In New Hampshire, there have been only three.
Prosecutors argue that’s a testament to New Hampshire’s public defenders and the ethical rectitude of its prosecutors. Innocence advocates say it’s not because people aren’t wrongfully convicted, but because state law makes it too onerous to prove one’s innocence post-conviction.
The Innocence Project, which has helped free more than 250 people from prison nationwide since its founding in 1992, says it takes, on average, 16 years to uncover and correct a wrongful conviction. The organization, which helped lawmakers draft the bill, has repeatedly stressed that the pending legislation simply allows the evidence to be considered.
“No one is going to be released from prison the day this bill takes effect,” Ye said. “It’s just about getting in the door and being heard if you have a credible case of innocence.”
Lawmakers’ attempts at change
For three consecutive years, a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers has attempted this statutory change.
In 2024, both chambers of the New Hampshire Legislature approved Senate Bill 507. The bill would’ve suspended the deadline if “a longer time period is warranted in the interests of justice.” It also would’ve specified that the deadline “shall not apply to a motion for new trial that avers that newly discovered evidence, new or additional forensic testing, or new scientific understanding would have been a real factor for the factfinder.”
“It’s a fairness thing,” former state Sen. Becky Whitley, D-Hopkinton, who introduced SB 507, said in an interview. “We don’t want to put innocent people behind bars. That’s very basic to me. And also, from a public safety perspective, you don’t want the wrong person behind bars for a crime, so it was a no-brainer to me.”
However, then-Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the bill. In his veto message, he called the effort “well-intentioned” but argued its text was “overly broad in allowing, if not inviting, an unending procession of frivolous petitions and appeals.”
After Sununu retired and Ayotte was inaugurated, lawmakers led by Sen. Bill Gannon, R-Sandown, tried again in 2025 with Senate Bill 141. This time, lawmakers got more specific. They stipulated the evidence must not have been available at the time of the original trial, limited the measure to felonies and class A misdemeanors for which the convict is incarcerated or still subject to the sentence, and removed the vague language of “warranted in the interests of justice.” The Senate approved the bill overwhelmingly. However, it soon fell victim to politics and legislative maneuvering in the House. There, representatives amended the bill to add an unrelated provision to expand confidentiality requirements in public libraries. The amended bill, 343-19, passed the House. However, the Senate refused to adopt the amendment, and the bill died before it could be sent to Ayotte for final approval. Gannon, through a spokesperson, declined a request for an interview.
This year, Rep. Tom Mannion, R-Pelham, filed HB 1422. The final version mirrors the language of SB 141, but it also lays out procedures for how a convict and their attorney introduce the evidence and how a judge must decide whether to consider it. The 2026 legislation also requires victims of the crime be notified, an effort to satisfy opponents concerned about victims’ rights.
“I believe in personal responsibility, limited government, and rule of law,” Mannion said in introducing the bill. “I also believe the government should never ignore credible evidence of innocence that raises serious concerns about the integrity of a conviction. Justice should never be denied simply because an arbitrary clock has run out.”
HB 1422 was overwhelmingly approved by both the House and Senate. However, Ayotte, who has made her past life as a prosecutor central to her political persona, vetoed it in July.
“As a murder prosecutor and former Attorney General, I understand the need to pursue and deliver justice,” Ayotte wrote in her veto message. “We do not need to create a novel approach to allow defendants to seek a new trial.”
She went on to argue that convicts can already file claims of habeas corpus, a legal maneuver that allows a petitioner to request the government justify why it’s detaining them, or coram nobis, a request that a court fix a factual error. For these reasons, she says, HB 1422 is unnecessary.
On Aug. 19, lawmakers will vote on whether to override the governor’s veto. Proponents, optimistic about the bill’s bipartisan support, hope to find the votes to do so. Mannion, who plans to vote to override, told the Bulletin he believes his House colleagues are with him but is unsure of what the Senate will do.
A deluge of frivolous complaints?
Throughout the legislative process, prosecutors have been sounding the alarm.
“As it is written, it would result in meritless claims,” Strafford County Attorney Emily Garod said in an interview with the Bulletin, “which, as a practical standpoint, take a lot of resources to respond to from people like me in my office.”
Garod added that extending the proceedings of a case also “has a very detrimental effect on the victims of the crimes for which these people were convicted,” victims who often want closure.
Garod pointed specifically to the phrase “evidence that was not available at the time of trial but is available at the time the petition is filed” from the bill text. She believes that’s “too vague” and would create the “unending procession of frivolous petitions and appeals” Sununu referenced in his veto years ago.
She argued the bill drafters should’ve included specific examples of what they believe should warrant an exception. For example, they could’ve specified that if police fail to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defendant, the deadline is suspended. She doesn’t like that it’s a catchall for any newly discovered evidence.
“It’s not that I don’t support somebody having the ability to seek a new trial if they’re wrongfully incarcerated,” she said. “Again, we have to have a balance, and it has to be clear what we’re hoping to root out, what problems we’re trying to fix with this bill.”
In 2004, after major advances in forensic science, New Hampshire lawmakers created a narrow exception to the deadline for DNA evidence. It expanded that exception in 2021. Garod suggested lawmakers take that approach.
However, the bill’s backers say the point of the bill is that they don’t know what scientific improvements or evidence will emerge in the future that might prove juries convicted the wrong person. They argue the bill would allow judges to quickly dismiss meritless claims, and they reject the notion that there would be a deluge of frivolous complaints.
“At the Innocence Project, we work across the country with network member partners as well to update laws and to remove these procedural barriers,” Ye said. “We’ve never seen a flood of litigation.”
Similar situations out West
Over the past two decades, several states have updated their laws and may offer New Hampshire guidance.
In 2019, Nevada enacted a process for people who maintain their innocence to petition the court. Officials there told the Bulletin they didn’t see a flood of meritless litigation.
“They did get a handful of them, but it was not the flood,” Heather Proctor, Nevada’s chief deputy attorney general, said. “And quite frankly, there was a concern about that as well in Nevada when they were talking about it, and it just didn’t manifest.”
The Nevada Attorney General’s Office said it’s received notice of 32 innocence petitions from district attorney’s offices throughout the state since 2019.
Jaimie Stills, the deputy attorney general in Nevada’s post-conviction division, agreed that it wasn’t “a flood” but acknowledged it was “a strain on us because we weren’t given any resources to deal with the additional workload.”
For that reason, Stills recommends New Hampshire appropriate funding for prosecutors to handle the transition to the new system.
“As everybody rushes to try and take advantage of it at first, you might have an initial surge, not necessarily a deluge,” she said. “But more cases than what you had before because you didn’t have any before.”
Still, if New Hampshire doesn’t give prosecutors the resources, Stills added, “We’ve managed to get through, so I think if this goes through, you guys can do it.”
Nevada drew inspiration from two neighboring states. In 2018, Wyoming enacted the Post-Conviction Determination of Factual Innocence Act into law, which eliminated the state’s two-year deadline to request a retrial on the basis of non-DNA evidence. (As in New Hampshire, there was already an exception for DNA evidence.) And in 2008, Utah enacted the Post-Conviction Remedies Act, which allows people to challenge their convictions on the basis of “new evidence.”
Three years later, Debra Brown became the first person exonerated under Utah’s law. Two men who hadn’t testified at the original trial came forward to say they saw the victim alive after the time prosecutors said Brown killed him — and she had an alibi for that time. She spent 17 years in prison.
According to the Registry of Exonerations, Brown is one of five exonerated under the law (five others have been exonerated under different legal mechanisms since 2008). No one has been exonerated in Wyoming or Nevada since the new laws were enacted, per the registry.
“We’re out here in the West,” Jen Springer, an attorney with the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, said. “But it is really important, I think, to just acknowledge that there’s a gap in the system, right? Our system is great, and it does the best it can, but it’s not perfect, and innocent people fall through the cracks. And it’s important to have reform in our states to allow those innocent defendants to get back into court and be able to establish their innocence. And sometimes it takes a long time in order to do that.”
Habeas corpus and coram nobis debates
Habeas corpus — Latin for “you have the body” — is a legal principle that predates the U.S. Constitution. Its roots lie in early English common law, and the U.S. legal system adopted it soon after the country’s founding. A writ of habeas corpus requests the government justify the petitioner’s detention. In other words, it forces the government to prove it has the right to imprison someone. A writ of coram nobis — Latin for “before us” — asks the government to correct a previous error. These two legal procedures are central to Ayotte’s opposition to eliminating New Hampshire’s post-conviction evidence deadline. The governor argues they make the bill unnecessary.
Cynthia Mousseau, an attorney with the New England Innocence Project and the only full-time innocence practitioner working in New Hampshire, says it doesn’t work like that in practice. Habeas corpus claims require a constitutional violation, she said.
“New evidence is not a constitutional violation,” Mousseau said. “So I can’t file solely on that basis.”
The New Hampshire Supreme Court seemingly agrees. In 2009’s Barnet v Ward, the court ruled “to obtain habeas corpus relief, the petitioner must show harmful constitutional error.” Justices have reaffirmed that standard in cases since.
On coram nobis, Mousseau said that while you can file the writs on a factual basis, coram nobis typically applies only to people no longer incarcerated “because otherwise it’s a habe.”
Indeed, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in a 2017 decision that a writ of coram nobis “addresses errors ‘discovered when the petitioner is no longer in custody and therefore cannot avail himself of the writ of habeas corpus.’ … Granting such an extraordinary writ is reserved for the rarest of cases.”
Mosseau said that using coram nobis to free a potentially wrongfully convicted prisoner would be a new interpretation she hasn’t heard before.
“We certainly were interested to hear that this is how the attorney general is interpreting the statutes,” she said. “That would be a different interpretation than the Supreme Court has taken.”
Mousseau says she has about 20 clients who maintain their innocence post-conviction, many of whom cannot access the courts because of the deadline, and a longer waitlist of cases she can’t take because of her current commitments. Her team investigates every claim and only takes clients for whom they can find evidence of innocence. She and her colleagues only accept claims of factual innocence, not clients who feel the court made some sort of legal or procedural error in their case.
Before vetoing the bill, Ayotte told the Bulletin she was consulting with the Attorney General’s Office before making her decision. The Attorney General’s Office declined to make anybody available for an interview, but Thomas Velardi, director of the office’s Division of Public Protection, testified to senators about the bill before lawmakers gave the bill their final approval.
In an April hearing, Velardi said even habeas corpus and coram nobis claims are unnecessary because “every prosecutor in the state has the same ethical obligation to look at newly discovered evidence and make the next right step in regard to what to do with that evidence.” He said the reason New Hampshire has so few exonerations is “because that’s the way prosecutors operate in New Hampshire.” He said he has reopened cases after being presented with new evidence and, in one case, petitioned a judge to dismiss the charge, which the judge did, after 18 years in prison. For these reasons, Velardi said wrongful convictions “is not a problem that exists in New Hampshire.”
The Attorney General’s Office did not answer emailed questions about concerns over whether habeas corpus and coram nobis can actually be used to free the wrongfully convicted; which specific case Velardi was referring to during his testimony; and whether it was concerned that, given Velardi’s argument that a prosecutor’s ethical duty to review their own convictions makes HB 1422 unnecessary, prosecutors are incentivized not to admit they incidentally put an innocent person in prison.