The NH Supreme Court’s ruling against a mother’s right to know squarely confirms that the state wants your money and your child so the state can do whatever it wants with your child without informing you and with no repercussions for administrators at the school or state employees.
Whenever there is an incident or an accident schools are instructed to stay out of it while police investigate and dictate.
But New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Chief Justice, Gordon MacDonald, protects corrupt police officers who have a history of dishonesty. Not only that but his assistant AG (Geoffrey Ward who is now a federal prosecutor) deleted the records of 28 such officers. MacDonald himself protected Child Sex Crimes Police Detective James F. McLauglin’s name from going public while he had him working on a Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St Paul’s School.
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Later, McLaughlin’s name would appear on the Laurie list only to be removed after multiple private hearings involving the AG’s office and the Banking Commission attorney. Brendan Chase was the attorney from the AG’s office at these hearings. Chase also defended the State and DCYF in the David Meehan trial.
That trial resulted in the jury awarding Meehan $38 million for child abuse suffered while he was a Ward of the State and his abuse was covered up by the State. The State argues it will only pay $475k. If the case ends up at the NH Supreme Court, it will find Gordon MacDonald, who dismissed Meehan’s original suit for “victim negligence.” He was a child!
In NH v Griffin Furlotte, a teen girl witness told the court that she had been lied to, bullied, and force-fed enumerated versions of events between her and 17-year-old Furlotte by police, administrators, and public officials. Nobody was investigated for this bullying of a minor by state employees and Pembroke school administrators. (let’s not forget the drug offenses of its principal either which resulted in a lenient sentence).
When police investigated Concord Schools about Primo “Howie” Leung, the Superintendent was let go without due process. Civil suits and payouts to the tune of $1.5 million ensued but no prosecutions occurred for Primo “Howie” Leung nor anyone else.
Concord PD Julie Curtin investigated and charged Leung in 2019 before she went to work for Gordon MacDonald in the AG’s office. While there, according to emails I obtained through a Right to Know request, she was given a “manuscript” to edit. That manuscript, I believe, was “Notes on a Silencing” by Lacy Crawford, published a few months later in June/July 2020. The book is about St Paul’s School and the alleged sex abuse suffered by Crawford and covered up by the school.
Curtin had obtained student files (including Crawford’s) from St Paul’s School without a warrant and then withheld former Crawford’s files from her with no explanation. Curtin left the AG’s office shortly after but Concord PD won’t release her disciplinary file and she continued to use her Concord PD email address while she worked in the AG’s office. In other words, there was no division between Concord PD and the AG’s office.
I have heard several comments about MacDonald’s office to the tune of “What the hell was going on.” It’s a good and timely question when it comes to the Jane Doe v Manchester School District Ruling. The record of how the state and its employees handle schools, students, and children is appalling.
What is a parent’s right to know about a cover-up that causes life-long trauma and damage to a student at any of NH schools, public or private, or in its youth facilities?
When PD Curtin investigated Owen Labrie in 2014, she told St Paul’s School’s administrators not to contact him even though the school thought it should.
Then, after police/prosecutors announced the charges of sexual assault, child endangerment and computer felony against Labrie, PD Julie Curtin got wind that he was suicidal. She then called the school and asked an administrator to contact Labrie’s mother because she was worried. She didn’t take accountability for the life-threatening results of what she, a public employee, had done.
Labrie was a boarder at St Paul’s School when the alleged sexual assault happened and even though he was 18, the school was in loco parentis. But the State didn’t want the school’s involvement except when they realized that their overcharging of Labrie and making a media sensation out of the announcement made him, understandably, suicidal. From graduating at the top of his class and on a full scholarship, police and prosecutors were licking their lips at their ability to blindside him with up to 70 years in prison and lifetime sex offender registration – for a political coup. Almost a decade later dozens of former students and their families are still suffering from the State’s atrocious handling of the case. These are not minor cases of trauma. They are serious.
The police and prosecutors could blackmail the school’s administrators and students into helping them with a witch hunt of a scholarship student in exchange for excusing the students and school administrators for a plethora of cover-ups of sexual assaults, serious drug dealing, and other misconduct. It was an extremely crooked deal that, for many, has forever undermined trust in the school and in the Concord police department. There is unlikely to be a single attorney in Concord who is not aware of the crooked deals going on because these kept their law firms in clover. They, too, have an obligation, by law, to report suspected child abuse, but Chuck Douglas Esq et al. would rather get the money instead of following the mandated reporting requirements.
Not only would the police let the Rector (who may well have been represented by David Vicinanzo) of St. Paul’s off the hook for cover-ups of felony-level sexual assault (complete with student witnesses), but they let off the son of Governor Maggie Hassan’s legal counsel who was also on the board of trustees and the board of NH Charitable Foundation. The prosecutor even admitted that she knew of a deal made for him (which should have perjured his testimony). He was part of a group of witnesses tampered with by the school’s legal counsel, Michael Delaney, a former AG himself. This led to Delaney having to withdraw from consideration for the First Circuit.
Delaney defended Judge Julie Introcaso for felonious conduct in a child custody case. She got no jail time either.
AG Joseph Foster, appointed by Governor Hassan, declined to prosecute anyone at Phillips Exeter Academy for sexual misconduct or cover-ups. Maggie Hassan’s husband was the head of the school. DCYF admitted to deleting files, and the NHCADSV praised the school for “leaving no stone unturned.”
A Manchester Middle School teacher received no jail time for sexting with a 7th grader. She only had her teaching credentials removed for the middle school level. Gordon MacDonald was AG at the time.
When Gordon MacDonald was an attorney at Nixon Peabody, he represented the Diocese of Manchester.
He defended a case brought by the family of a young teenage boy against the church after a priest had allegedly shown porn material to the boy.
Macdonald argued that the priest could show porn to the boy under the first amendment.
Is New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Court Chief Justice fit to rule on any cases involving children and students?
It was Anna Carrigan who brought a lawsuit against the State for its negligence against children. MacDonald dismissed that too.
