NORTH HAVERHILL — A Grafton County Superior Court judge recently set aside Scott Traudt’s 2008 conviction for assaulting a Lebanon police officer, putting an end to Traudt’s yearslong effort to clear his name and his record a decade and a half after he served his time in prison.

In an 18-page decision released last week, Judge Peter Bornstein wrote it was “undisputed” that either the Grafton County Attorney’s Office or the Lebanon Police Department “knowingly withheld evidence” that would have bolstered Traudt’s defense at trial.

Traudt, now 57, spent a year in state prison after a jury convicted him of assaulting then-Sgt. Phil Roberts during a traffic stop in 2007. Roberts is now police chief. Traudt was found not guilty of simple assault against then-Lebanon police Cpl. Richard Smolenski.

“It’s been a long time coming for Scott,” Jared Bedrick, a Portsmouth attorney who represented Traudt in his latest court hearing, told InDepthNH, an online news site. “He’s a great example of someone whose perseverance paid off. He’s been fighting since day one.”

For years, Traudt has argued in the courts and media that Roberts and Smolenski were “renegade” cops who instigated the physical altercation and he acted in self-defense.

“A normal person probably would have given up a long time ago, but you can’t quit,” Traudt, who lives in Strafford, said Tuesday. “It’s a grind, but the system works.”

As Bornstein pointed out in his ruling, prosecutors had no video evidence of the late-night encounter on Route 12A in West Lebanon, and the “elements of the charges were established by testimony only.”

The evidence in question all these years pertained to Smolenski’s disciplinary record. By law, prosecutors must inform anyone accused of a crime about exculpatory evidence that could be used at trial to impeach a police officer’s testimony or a prosecutor’s statements.

But that didn’t happen in Traudt’s case.

Traudt and his attorney weren’t told that Smolenski had been disciplined by his Lebanon police superiors following an internal investigation in 2006 — a year before Traudt’s arrest.

Smolenski was suspended for three days and placed on six-month probation after the investigation found he had engaged in an extramarital affair with an 18-year-old woman while on duty.

The investigation also found that Smolenski had “used his position as a police officer to help the 18-year-old woman by contacting an individual with whom he had had a conflict and ordered the individual to stop harassing her,” Bornstein wrote.

After years of denying Traudt’s public records requests, the city turned over the investigative report involving Smolenski in June 2021.

The city’s hand was forced by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which ruled in May 2020 that internal information about alleged police misconduct was no longer automatically exempt from the state’s right-to-know law.

At a court hearing in November, Bornstein agreed with Bedrick that the prosecution had “fundamentally erred by not providing information” before the 2008 trial. As a result, Traudt was denied his right to a fair trial, the judge said.

“Given that Smolenski’s testimony supported the facts for the assault against Chief Roberts, for which the jury found the defendant guilty, the State’s failure to provide the undisclosed evidence to the defendant may well have improperly affected the outcome of the trial,” Bornstein wrote.

Nancy Gray, an assistant county attorney at the time, tried the case. “Police had a duty to tell Gray, and Gray had a responsibility to tell the defense,” Bedrick, who didn’t represent Traudt at the 2008 trial, said at the November hearing.

In her closing argument nearly 15 years ago, Gray maintained that both Smolenski and Roberts had spotless disciplinary records.

“If the State had presented the same closing argument that it did, or otherwise had represented that Smolenski had a clean disciplinary record, the defendant could have used the undisclosed evidence to show the opposite,” Bornstein wrote.

Attempts by Bedrick and the Valley News to reach Gray, who retired several years ago, have been unsuccessful.

Smolenski, a Lebanon police officer for 18 years, was fired in 2021 after being charged with stalking a woman he’d previously had a romantic relationship with. Smolenski has pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor and is scheduled for trial in March.

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