Disclaimer: I have no idea whether Logan Clegg is guilty or innocent of the charges for which he is on trial, but you can’t have a fair trial (a constitutional right) if the players are corrupt.
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In the courtroom providing testimony have been – among others – police detectives, former Assistant AG Geoffrey Ward, State Lab Technician Katie Swango, as well as other DNA labs “experts.”
The Concord Police do not have a reputation for being honest, and Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood has never addressed this. At least two Concord PD are listed on the Laurie List.
Former Assistant AG Geoffrey Ward deleted the files of 28 police officers on the Laurie List after I had written to John Scippa of Police Standards & Training regarding concerns over Concord Police Julie Curtin’s dishonesty (very well documented, in fact, in NH v Owen Labrie. And, it would appear, from her arrest warrant/statements for Primo “Howie” Leung as well as her involvement in the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St. Paul’s School, during which she obtained students files without a warrant under instruction from the AG’s office where Geoffrey Ward was working with Jane Young, Gordon MacDonald and Laurie List police officer Jim McLaughlin).
The two bullet casings found a month after the murders for which Logan Clegg is alleged to have committed were discovered by Geoffrey Ward – the man who deletes files of corrupt police officers. The man who helped sort out a no-jail-time plea deal for Judge Julie Introcaso after she whited out judicial documents and ordered a Guardian Ad Litem to be paid using Apple Pay. Julie Introcaso had as her legal counsel former AG Michael Delaney, who is alleged to have tampered with state witnesses in New Hampshire v. Owen Labrie (on record with the US Senate Judiciary Committee). Former AG Michael Delaney also admitted failures of his office for the FRM Ponzi Scheme.
Sitting next to Logan Clegg for part of the courtroom proceedings is Catherine Ruffle, Merrimack County Superior Court Clerk. Catherine Ruffle was the prosecutor in NH v. Owen Labrie and admitted to Judge Larry Smukler that a deal had been made for one of the state witnesses, Andrew Thomson. Thomson’s legal counsel was Jim Rosenberg at Shaheen & Gordon (formerly of the AG’s office. Andrew Thomson’s mother, Lucy Hodder, was legal counsel for Governor Maggie Hassan and on the board of trustees for St. Paul’s School, for whom Michael Delaney was acting as legal counsel during the trial of Labrie.
Prosecutor Catherine Ruffle told the judge of the deal given to Andrew Thomson after she had been informed of the witness tampering involving Michael Delaney. Concord Councilwoman Amanda Grady Sexton informed her of this tampering – according to the report on file with the US Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet Catherine Ruffle proceeded to allow Andrew Thomson to testify. When her admission to the judge about the deal was unsealed months later, she retracted her comments, and DA Scott Murray and Jim Rosenberg backed her up. Miraculously, neither Andrew Thomson’s name nor his solicitations for sexual encounters with the state witness Chessy Prout ever made it into the civil complaint brought against St. Paul’s School. Michael Delaney (who was acting as counsel for the school) stated in writing that he had been in contact with the plaintiff’s (Chessy Prout’s) attorneys before they filed the suit. These attorneys were introduced by Concord PD Julie Curtin, who no longer works with Concord PD.
State lab technician Katie Swango is the only honest one in this group, from my observations. She testified in NH v. Owen Labrie that the DNA in the semen/sperm portion of the State witness/complainant’s underwear could not be attributed to Owen Labrie. But prosecutor Catherine Ruffle and her cohort Joseph Chernieske convinced the judge that the State lab report was the same as the Concord police lab report and that they were interchangeable. Thus, only the Concord Police lab report was entered into the exhibits for the jury’s consideration. The police lab report didn’t test the semen/sperm portion of the underwear, but the police sent the sample to the state lab in a bag which they labeled “AFSA” (Aggravated Felonious Sexual Assault) – bizarre since Concord PD Julie Curtin wrote down that Chessy Prout had said, “I have never said he raped me.”
Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood admitted a couple of years ago that the police pay witnesses for Grand Jury testimony and that this is not always made known to the defense and judge. It was a case involving federal prosecutors, just like Geoffrey Ward is now.
Has it occurred to anyone that police may have been the murderers? If you think about police statements in relation to past unsolved murders in New Hampshire (especially those of Police Detective Jim McLaughlin), that is an avenue that should have been explored in this case. But police and prosecutors work too closely together for that to ever be considered.
Thus – guilty or not – the lowest hanging fruit for a state win using testimony from state employees with credibility issues is the homeless guy, Logan Clegg.