MANCHESTER, NH – As Election Day draws closer, New Hampshire voters might not realize that they will be voting for county attorneys along with all of the other much more noticeable races. Nevertheless, Nicholas Sarwark is doing everything he can to tell the voters of Hillsborough County his vision on how to provide efficient and effective justice for victims of crime.
A registered Libertarian and current executive director of the Libertarian Policy Institute, Sarwark also earned the Democratic nomination in September after no registered Democrat filed for the primary and he earned over 10-times more Democratic votes than Republican incumbent John Coughlin.
However, unlike other offices up for election this November, Sarwark doesn’t believe partisanship is a factor beyond that it is corrosive to trust in the nation’s judicial system.
“How the office is managed, I plan to make it as non-partisan as possible,” he said. “There isn’t a Republican or Democratic or even Libertarian way to prosecute a criminal case and seek justice for victims. You just serve up the elements beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury and try to seek justice in every case, and that’s what I think we can do.”
Without those contrasts in partisan ideology compared to Coughlin, Sarwark instead hopes to make his case to voters based primarily on his experience. After receiving a law degree, he served as a deputy public defender in Colorado for five years, trying 36 cases before the Colorado courts as well as trial experience in hundreds of felony cases and thousands of misdemeanor cases in an area just south of Denver.
Although he has not actively practiced law since moving to New Hampshire in 2019, he has helped non-profits in the area.
Sarwark believes his public defense experience can be reversed to help other attorneys representing Hillsborough County realize gaps that lawyers focused just on the prosecutorial side of trials might miss.
He also believes that there must be additional focus on early case resolution in cases with no named victim to dedicate additional resources toward trying cases involving violent crime and also reduce caseloads to avoid losing prosecutors from burnout.
“[Violent] crimes should go to the top of the priority list, ahead of someone, say, who has pills in their pocket. Both of them are illegal, but one of them causes people to feel unsafe in their community, and that’s not right. You can focus on crimes with named victims, while still doing justice to those other cases,” he said.
Sarwark also believes readjusting priorities would help prosecutors seeking the revocation of pre-trial release for those who have violated terms of personal recognizance bail.
“One of the problems I’ve heard from law enforcement is that when these problems occur, prosecutors are just so overloaded with the hundreds and hundreds of other cases they’re handling, there’s not an attentiveness to things like this that could be preventative,” he said. “That is the biggest tragedy of the whole thing. Everyone is working really hard in that office to do as good a job as they can, but if people are just so overloaded, even basic things, like holding a hearing to see if the defendant is out should be held because they’re a safety risk, there’s just no time for it. And when there’s no time for it, we get these tragedies instead.”
Sarwark also believes that the county attorney’s office needs to do more work needs to be done outside of the courtroom to increase transparency with elected officials and the public as well as be more nimble adapting to new laws and the impact of inflation on county budgets.
“It’s disturbing that a lot of people don’t know who the county attorney is, nobody knows results of the county attorney’s office over the past two years. They have a sense the county attorney’s office should do something, but they don’t know what could be done differently or better, and there’s a sense of resignation,” he said. “Voters assume it can’t get better. Challenging that assumption is part of why I wanted to run for this office.”
“I want to proactively meet with members of the community. Reducing crime isn’t just about police, it’s about everybody,” he added. “We need to work together and not isolate into silos.”