Former State Senator Woodburn exhausts all options to avoid prison sentence | Courts

On his penultimate day as presiding judge of the Coos County Superior Court, Peter Bornstein concluded one of the longest-running and most significant cases ever tried before him.

In a resolution signed on August 15, Bornstein denied former 1st District Senator Jeff Woodburn's request to suspend the remaining 30 days of his sentence and thus avoid prison time for his two convictions for criminal damage to property.

Clerk Viktoriya Kovalenko in an email.

Woodburn, 59, originally from Whitefield, was once a rising star in the New Hampshire Democratic Party, representing his district that included all of Coos and much of Grafton counties. He was elected to the state Senate in 2012 and rose to become minority leader, but lost re-election months after his August 2018 arrest on domestic violence charges.

Woodburn was charged with four counts of simple assault, two counts of domestic violence, two counts of criminal damage and trespassing – all misdemeanors – in connection with a series of incidents between August 10, 2017 and June 10, 2018 involving a person identified in court documents as his “domestic partner.”

In May 2021, a jury found Woodburn guilty of criminal damage, assault and domestic violence charges.

Woodburn appealed these convictions to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which upheld the malicious damage to property charges but dismissed the assault and domestic violence charges on the grounds that the presiding judge (Bornstein) “erred by failing to instruct the jury on the issue of self-defense.”

In March of this year, a new jury twice failed to agree on whether Woodburn was guilty of assault and domestic violence, prompting Bornstein to grant the defense's motion for a mistrial without objection from the state.

The state subsequently declined to retry Woodburn on these charges. Woodburn also sought a retrial of the criminal damage convictions and a reduced sentence.

None of Woodburn’s attempts were successful.

In his July 15 order, Bornstein said Woodburn's request for a modification of sentence was “extremely untimely,” adding that Woodburn had “waived any right he may have had to seek a modification of sentence.”

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