Bosen: New Bail Law Hides Incompetence, Wouldn't Have Saved Berlin Murder Victim

By Theodore Bosen, InDepth NH

Governor Ayotte and AG Formella recently applauded the new bail law and bail reporting system, suggesting that Berlin murder victim Marisol Fuentes would be alive today had these changes been in place when her husband, Michael Gleason, murdered her last July after being released on bail, suggesting that he would have been held in pre-trial detention instead.

However, that conclusion is entirely unsupportable by the facts. As the facts found in the report of last August by the New Hampshire Supreme Court Committee ( https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/documents/2025-08/8.25.25_GleasonReportFinal.pdf ) assembled to investigate the murder indicate, prosecutorial negligence, and not a high burden of proof under the former bail statute, was the primary reason for Gleason's freedom while on bail.

Neither a lesser prosecutorial burden nor a real-time bail reporting system would have made a difference. Only a competent prosecution team could have protected Marisol, and in Berlin, that does not exist. Ayotte, and her lapdog AG, even went so far as to release a competing analysis one month later in an attempt to whitewash the inferences of police negligence revealed by the Supreme Court Committee, while intimating that it was previous bail reform and a careless judiciary that were to blame. But that is clearly not the case in the Fuentes matter where the fault lies entirely with the Berlin Police Department.

Michael Gleason was charged on April 26, 2025, with three major felonies, including aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping, alleged to have taken place on the morning of April 25^th against victim Marisol Fuentes, his wife, at their marital abode. There was no recording made of Gleason's bail hearing by telephone on April 27th, nor any documents submitted, but the Supreme Court Committee assumed the bail argument would have been substantially the same as that presented at 2 PM the next day at the Arraignment hearing by the same police prosecutor, which was recorded. There, the probable cause affidavit authored by the arresting officer to justify Gleason's arrest and criminal charges was offered in support of the police prosecutor's oral argument. That affidavit and recording are public records available upon request at the Berlin Circuit Court, Criminal Division [State v. Gleason, 423-2025-CR-184 (Apr. 28, 2025)].

As the Committee Report accurately describes, during the arraignment hearing, the Berlin police prosecutor relied solely upon that affidavit in presenting the required evidence of dangerousness in requesting that Gleason be detained until trial, adding only a couple more facts, those being that Gleason attempted to flee upon being approached by arresting officers and that he had Fuentes’ phone on him.

Aside from those additional facts unrelated to the issue of dangerousness, the written affidavit was left to speak for itself on the issue. It detailed Marisol's allegations of unconsented sexual assault and physical restriction of movement lasting approximately one hour, verbal abuse, and theft of cash. The State’s argument ended by stating that Fuentes was then allowed by Gleason to leave the house in order to go to work and that she later left work to spend the day with a friend, and that at the end of the day, the friend called police to report the incident.

The required threshold of evidence for detaining a defendant without bail on the grounds of dangerousness, however, at that time, was “clear and convincing” evidence, the highest civil standard of proof – far more than the mere ”probable cause” standard required to bring charges. This legal standard of evidence was well known to the prosecutorial community, having been in place since 2018 as the standard for pre-trial detention based on dangerousness.

Case law in New Hampshire defines dangerousness for such purposes as consisting of credible threats of imminent physical violence, and in particular, an ongoing pattern of behavior exhibiting such. In the case of the well-studied phenomenon known as “Intimate Partner Violence (IPV),” dangerousness is indicated by evidence of repeated attempts by a defendant to possessively control or manipulate his victim-partner by restricting her time with friends, family, and other objects of his jealousy. Other indicators are interfering with work, medical needs, use of personal property, and access to her home, vehicles, or finances. The proliferation of firearms in the defendant's immediate environment, coupled with those other indicators, is also an element of imminent threat in assessing dangerousness.

One key to the existence of such evidence in the Gleason case was a statement by the affiant that Fuentes was “screened through our Domestic Violence LAP (Lethality Assessment Program) form.” This form is a collection of questions and responses designed to uncover signs of dangerousness that amount to potential life-threatening behavior by the defendant. A blank form, unfilled-out, is attached as an exhibit to the Committee Report, but there is no completed form in the court record, nor was there any presentation by the police prosecutor to the arraignment judge of any of the contents of any purported LAP screening of Marisol. As a result of the screening, according to the affiant, "he gave Fuentes information" about the “Response” organization. There was no indication in the record, however, of whether or not she acted upon it. There was also no evidence, either, of any victim/witness advocate having been involved in the case. Such a person, in most prosecutorial teams, is assigned to monitor ongoing developments with a victim in order to coordinate information between related civil and criminal dockets and to keep prosecutors abreast of any related domestic abuse proceedings, while also assisting the victim in accessing support services.

What the Committee Report did find, however, was that the motherlode of IPV evidence constituting Gleason's potential dangerousness was sitting in a domestic violence petition file on the civil side of the same Circuit Court - a four-page hand-written affidavit by Fuentes as presented at 9 AM on the morning of Gleason's arraignment. The Committee Report concluded that sufficient evidence was “available” referring to that and other developing evidence that, had it been brought to the attention of any of the bail judges, would have easily constituted the required threshold to detain Gleason without bail. But none of that was made available to the judges doing the bail hearings, and, as the report makes clear, judges do not do their own investigation in our adversarial system, but rather, must remain detached and neutral while evidence to prove a case is presented by the parties appearing before them. Therefore, it was the prosecutor's job to gather and present all the available evidence of Gleason's dangerousness.

The relevant evidence of Gleason's dangerousness sitting next door in Marisol's domestic abuse petition presented to the civil court just 5 hours before his afternoon arraignment consisted of the following:

1. Marisol represented that, during the April 25 incident, Gleason accused her of cheating on him and blamed her family for encouraging her. She also detailed several past incidents during which Gleason exhibited extreme jealousy and controlling behavior, including one incident during which he forced her to leave the house on foot in the middle of the night when it was snowing when she had nowhere safe to go.

2. Marisol stated that, in addition to taking her phone and cash during the April 25 incident, Gleason took possession of her house and car keys in order to limit her freedom.

3. Marisol stated that Gleason possessed multiple firearms which he kept close at hand.

4. Marisol believed that Gleason was "capable of seriously harming or killing her if he had the chance" and was scared that Gleason would "retaliate against her for seeking protection."

None of this information, all clearly constituting evidence of Gleason's pattern of dangerousness, ever saw the light of day in either the arraignment hearing or any subsequent criminal court hearing where bail status was in issue.

Beyond that, the Supreme Court Committee Report cited the following facts which reveal additional failures by the prosecution:

1. Had the prosecution believed the first bail decision to be erroneous, there was nothing stopping it from appealing to the Superior Court for a new hearing, as is either party’s right. It did not. Moreover, during the subsequent probable cause hearing of May 21, 2025, which bound the case over to Superior Court, the prosecutor failed to request a redetermination of the existing bail order.

2. On May 22d, in the associated civil domestic violence case, Marisol filed a complaint for contempt, alleging that Gleason had not complied with court orders to return her property and had violated his restraining order by having his vehicles removed from the premises without seeking police oversight. She stated that she had brought that to the attention of police who said they “would investigate.” Either one of these acts should have been grounds for an immediate bail revocation hearing in criminal court had one been requested. None was.

3. A subsequent stalking complaint was filed on July 1^st by a minor who stated that Gleason had sexually assaulted her and stalked her, and that he had guns “everywhere he was staying,” Police opened up an investigation, but failed to request an immediate re-hearing on this new evidence of dangerousness in the Fuentes matter.

4. A friend of Gleason’s called police before Marisol was shot and told them that Gleason was talking about suicide and taking her with him. They simply sent an officer to tell Gleason of the call and to ask if he was well. They did not initiate a re-hearing of the detention issue, nor did they relay this information to Marisol. Two days later Gleason shot her.

The new bail law recommends more training as a remedy, but trained personnel already exist. They are called trial lawyers and victim/witness advocates. Every community should be using them for domestic violence bail matters, Berlin does not. Marisol is the fifth person to be shot to death in the last decade in a domestic violence matter in the greater Berlin community. Meanwhile, Berlin voters, in their wisdom, decided to elevate to state rep the police commissioner who presided over the department during all that time.

One must wonder if the law enforcement response would have been different had Marisol Fuentes been the citizen and Michael Gleason the undocumented immigrant. As Kelly Ayotte is fond of calling them all "criminals" repeatedly, it is hardly a wonder that the tragedy of Marisol Fuentes has been pretty much forgotten by most of Berlin. Rest assured, however - there is an investigation still in progress by the Berlin police nine months later!

New Hampshire residents may wake up when they realize that they are now paying, at a rate of about $50,000 per detainee, annually, for a significantly larger number of pre-trial detainees now held on the mere “probable cause” standard until their trial dates, many of whom will eventually be found "not guilty" by the courts, rather than pay the far lesser cost of providing competent, professional prosecution teams capable of successfully detaining the truly dangerous. Instead, the law has been changed to cover for the incompetence of law enforcement while perpetuating the misplaced stigmatization of criminal court judges.

New Hampshire used to prioritize individual liberty. No more.

Mr. Bosen is a retired trial attorney in Berlin. He and his wife, Barbara, operate a goat farm and inn up the road from Marisol Fuentes' home and frequented the Mexican restaurant she managed where she was murdered - "La Casita."

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.