A bipartisan effort to eliminate New Hampshire’s three-year deadline for convicted inmates to introduce new evidence of innocence cleared its final legislative hurdle Thursday, putting House Bill 1422 on Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk and forcing what may be one of the most consequential criminal justice decisions of her first year in office. As reported by the New Hampshire Bulletin, the New Hampshire Senate approved the bill, sponsored by Pelham Republican Rep. Tom Mannion, with bipartisan support that has built across two prior failed attempts.
The legislation would, in effect, give people convicted of serious crimes in New Hampshire courts a permanent statutory window to ask for a new trial when previously unavailable evidence comes to light, whether through advances in DNA testing, newly identified witnesses, or shifts in forensic science. Under current law, the same request becomes legally barred once three years have passed from the date of conviction, regardless of how strong the new evidence might be. Ayotte, a former state attorney general, now has three options: sign HB 1422 into law, veto it, or let it become law without her signature.
What the Current Law Does and Why Critics Call It Unjust
New Hampshire’s three-year deadline is rooted in RSA 526, the state statute that governs motions for new trials. The provision sets a hard time limit on when post-conviction motions for a new trial can be filed in civil and criminal cases alike. With limited judicial carve-outs, the practical reality for someone serving a long sentence in a New Hampshire prison is that, after three years, the legal door to introducing newly discovered evidence is effectively shut.
That timing collides with how wrongful convictions actually get unwound. According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations and innocence advocacy groups, the average wrongful conviction in the United States takes roughly 11 years to overturn from the date of conviction. DNA technology can advance, eyewitnesses can recant, jailhouse informants can be discredited, and forensic disciplines like bite-mark analysis can be reclassified as unreliable, all on timelines that have nothing to do with a three-year statutory clock. New Hampshire’s deadline, critics argue, lets the state’s justice system close cases on schedule but leaves no legal mechanism for it to admit a mistake on a realistic timeline.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mannion, has framed his argument in those terms throughout the session. Writing in NH Journal earlier this year, Mannion argued that a justice system that cannot correct its own errors is, by definition, not just. The New England Innocence Project, which has worked alongside Mannion to push the bill through three consecutive legislative sessions, has cited specific New Hampshire cases where evidence emerged after the three-year window and could not be heard.
Two Years of False Starts
This is the third year in a row that lawmakers have tried to retire the three-year deadline, and the closest the effort has come to becoming law.
In 2024, then-Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed a similar measure. Sununu, a former prosecutor in his own right, argued at the time that opening the post-conviction window indefinitely would invite a flood of frivolous claims from inmates with nothing to lose, swamping the courts and re-traumatizing victims who had been promised finality at sentencing.
In 2025, both the House and Senate approved a similar bill, only to have it die in late-session negotiations after legislative maneuvering attached an unrelated amendment regarding public library confidentiality. The committee of conference could not resolve the differences, and the bill expired without reaching the governor’s desk. That sequence is the kind of procedural mishap that often kills criminal justice reform bills in Concord, where the substance is popular but the legislative calendar is unforgiving.
The 2026 version, HB 1422, was carefully designed to avoid those traps. It is narrower than past iterations, focused only on the timing question, and it cleared both chambers without the kind of poison-pill amendments that doomed the 2025 effort. The Senate’s Thursday vote sends the legislation to Ayotte cleanly.
What HB 1422 Actually Does
The substance of HB 1422 is straightforward. The bill amends New Hampshire’s post-conviction relief framework to eliminate the three-year time limit on new-trial motions in criminal cases when the petitioner asserts that newly discovered evidence demonstrates innocence. The bill defines newly discovered evidence to include not only physical evidence and witness statements that were unavailable at trial, but also new forensic testing of existing evidence and new “scientific understanding” that undermines forensic testimony presented at the original trial.
That last category is significant. Over the past decade, courts and academic reviews have concluded that several forensic techniques once treated as authoritative, including bite-mark comparison, certain hair-microscopy methods, and some bloodstain pattern analyses, do not produce results as reliable as juries were once told. Inmates whose convictions rested partly on now-discredited forensic testimony have, in other states, used updated scientific consensus as the basis for new-trial motions. New Hampshire’s three-year deadline currently makes that pathway unavailable here.
What the bill does not do is automatically reopen old convictions or hand inmates an easier path to a new trial. Petitioners would still need to convince a court that the new evidence is meaningful, was not available at trial through reasonable diligence, and has the potential to change the outcome. The bill simply removes the procedural deadline that currently lets the state move to dismiss without ever reaching those merits questions.
The Prosecutor Pushback
New Hampshire prosecutors, including some county attorneys, have opposed the bill, echoing arguments Sununu made in his 2024 veto message. Their core concern is volume. Eliminating the deadline, they argue, would invite serial filings from inmates who are demonstrably guilty but who have nothing to lose by trying. Each filing, even a frivolous one, requires court time, prosecutor review, and, in some cases, contact with victims and families who would prefer the case stay closed.
Supporters counter that the bill’s substantive standards remain a meaningful screen. Inmates whose claims are obviously without merit will see their petitions dismissed at the threshold, just as they are in states with no time limit. The relevant comparison, supporters argue, is not New Hampshire today versus a hypothetical flood of new filings, but New Hampshire today versus a system that lets a clearly innocent person stay incarcerated because a procedural clock ran out before the evidence existed to free them.
The bipartisan coalition behind HB 1422 includes Republicans, Democrats, libertarian-aligned legislators, defense attorneys, and the New England Innocence Project. That breadth has been one of the bill’s distinguishing features compared to the 2024 and 2025 efforts.
What Ayotte Will Weigh
Gov. Ayotte’s decision is not as simple as her predecessor’s. Sununu vetoed the 2024 version largely on prosecutorial-burden grounds. Ayotte has her own deep prosecutorial experience as a former New Hampshire Attorney General, and she has been publicly committed to a tough-on-crime posture. At the same time, she has also signaled openness to certain criminal justice reforms, particularly those framed around due process and victim-side concerns, and she campaigned on competence and an interest in fixing things that do not work.
A signature on HB 1422 would put New Hampshire in the company of states that have either eliminated post-conviction time bars for innocence claims or expanded statutory exceptions to them. It would also make Ayotte the first governor in three years to give the New England Innocence Project a clean win in the State House. A veto would draw on the same prosecutorial concerns Sununu cited, and would likely satisfy county attorneys, but would also reopen the criticism that New Hampshire’s law is uniquely punitive on this question among New England states. Letting the bill become law without her signature would split the difference, allowing the policy change without putting the governor’s name on it.
The state’s high-profile criminal cases continue to remind voters of why the underlying question matters. The recent $15.5 million civil judgment against Adam Montgomery is one example of a case the system handled the way many would say it should. But for every case like that, defense attorneys and innocence advocates point to lower-profile cases where the procedural rules made a substantive review impossible.
What Happens Next
Ayotte has a defined window under New Hampshire law to decide whether to sign, veto, or let HB 1422 become law without her signature. If she signs or allows the bill to take effect, the legislation will likely include an effective date language that gives courts time to update procedural rules, and will, at minimum, apply to convictions secured after the effective date. The application to existing convictions will depend on the precise wording of the final enrolled bill.
Whatever Ayotte decides, the bill’s underlying coalition is unlikely to disappear. The New England Innocence Project, Mannion, and the bill’s bipartisan co-sponsors have already shown three years of staying power on this question. If a 2026 veto follows, expect a 2027 version. If the bill becomes law, it will mark the most significant change to New Hampshire’s post-conviction relief framework in decades, and one that resembles the broader pattern of due-process focused legislation the State House has produced this session.
For now, the bill is on the governor’s desk. The next move belongs to Ayotte.
Frequently Asked Questions
For related coverage, see our reporting on NH Senate Sends Bill Punishing False DCYF Reports to Gov. Ayotte’s Desk.
