By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
The first of two scheduled sex assault trials against former Grafton County House of Corrections Officer Max Fournier is cancelled as prosecutors have dropped two of the three original charges.
The trial was cancelled July 22, the day it was set to begin before a jury in Grafton Superior Court. According to the court’s recording, Assistant Belknap County Attorney Sheldon Nason told Judge Lawrence Macleod the victim, a female inmate allegedly assaulted by Fournier, is having a memory issue.
During trial preparation days before the trial, the woman’s memory of the alleged assault no longer line up with the facts in the indictments, Nason said.
“That brought us to the point where it creates a problem of integrity on the indictments,” Nason said. “We feel we can’t go forward at this point.”
Fournier’s attorney, Mark Sisti, said in court the victim’s current memory places events as happening more than a month outside of the timeframe in the indictments.
“They ran into a fairly major factual collision,” Sisti said. “There seems to be some real problems with sequencing. I don’t think the prosecution can go forward.”
At that point, the jury had already been informed Fournier was on trial for three counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault. Rather than push forward with trial on the remaining viable criminal count, MacLeod allowed Nason to drop two of the charges.
Nason now plans to go to a grand jury this month to seek new indictments based on the victim’s current memory of events. That leaves the trial date for this case in limbo. Fournier does have a separate trial on one class B felony for felonious sexual assault scheduled for later this fall. That trial involves a different female inmate as the alleged victim.
Fournier was indicted in 2022 for the alleged assaults of two different female prisoners, called Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 in the court files. He’s charged with one class B felony for felonious sexual assault, and three special enhanced felonies for aggravated felonious sexual assault. The three aggravated felonious sexual assault charges are enhanced due to Fournier’s position of authority over the woman.
Fournier was removed from his position in the jail in 2020 as an investigation was underway. The allegations first surfaced in late 2019, but Fournier was not removed until May of 2020 after the criminal probe started.
Fournier was a corporal and responsible for training other corrections officers as well as making sure prisoners had basic needs met when he was removed. At the time, his boss was Superintendent Tom Elliott.
In a 2021 investigation into an unrelated criminal case, a female staffer at the jail told investigators with the Grafton County Sheriff’s Department that she had been involved in a relationship with Elliott starting when she was about 21 in which she was subjected to non-consensual sexual encounters according to an investigator’s report on her statement. The woman did not wish to pursue criminal charges at that point.
