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NH Judiciary Committee hears bill to expand attorney general forfeiture report
Summary
Supporters said HB1631 would improve oversight by adding detailed fields to the attorney general's annual forfeiture report; the attorney general's office warned publicizing case identifiers could pose safety and privacy risks. Testimony produced no committee vote.
Representative Daniel Popovich Miller introduced HB1631, saying the attorney general's current annual report on state forfeiture activity "is not useful as a way to inform our policy" and asking the committee to require more detailed, measurable reporting so legislators and the public can evaluate how civil forfeiture is being used.
Miller said the measure narrows an earlier proposal and responds to objections raised last term. "All that I'm looking to do is to add some more detail that is critical in making this reporting effective in terms of helping us assess whether these laws work," he told the committee.
Josh Fleisher, senior assistant attorney general and chief of the drug-prosecution unit, said the attorney general's office already collects line-item data from seizing agencies and aggregates it for the published report but cautioned that including criminal-case numbers and filing courts could make it possible to link report entries to individuals. "Those are the two of immediate concern," he said, referring to subsections in the draft that would publish case identifiers.
Fleisher and other Justice Department staff warned that publishing identifiers alongside amounts and seizure descriptions could expose people to harm by creating an easily accessible list of individuals from whom drugs or large amounts of cash were seized. He also said the AG's office would not generally rely on additional fields for prosecution purposes; his unit produces the data but does not use it for secondary investigative work.
Alastair Whitney of the Institute for Justice testified in favor of the bill, arguing transparency does not undermine law enforcement and helps legislators and the public oversee the use of forfeiture. "Lawmakers cannot effectively oversee what they cannot see," he said.
Committee members asked technical questions about timing (whether to report only finalized cases or also in-progress matters), duplication across fiscal years, and the bill's fiscal impact. The sponsor said retaining criminal-case numbers in the dataset would allow readers to detect duplicates across reporting years, while some members suggested reporting only closed cases would give a clearer annual tally.
The committee closed the hearing on HB1631 with no action recorded at that time.
