Janet Subers

On April 28, 2025, Berlin Circuit Court Judge Janet H. Subers upheld a magistrate's $5,000 bail order for Michael Gleason Jr., denying the prosecutor's request to overturn it and hold him in jail ahead of trial. Gleason had been arrested days earlier on felonious sexual assault, kidnapping, and theft charges after his wife, Marisol Fuentes-Huaracha, told police he had sexually assaulted her, stolen $8,000 from her, and overpowered her by force.

A court had already issued a protective order the same week requiring Gleason to relinquish his weapons. Despite four separate court orders to do so across the following weeks, Berlin Police never recorded collecting any of Gleason's firearms. On July 6, six weeks after Fuentes-Huaracha first went to police, Gleason found her at the Berlin restaurant where she worked, shot her to death, and killed himself.

A subsequent internal Judicial Branch review — led by Judge Ellen Christo, the circuit court's own administrative judge — examined the bail decisions directly. The committee found that both the magistrate who set the original bail and Subers, who upheld it on review, "had enough evidence of dangerousness to deny bail to Gleason in April." It cited the "violent and sexual nature of the charged offenses" and concluded the facts known at the time met New Hampshire's "clear and convincing" standard for denying bail in a dangerousness case — a standard the review found Subers's own ruling should have applied differently.

The magistrate who set the initial bail, Stephanie Johnson, is no longer employed by the Judicial Branch, and Governor Kelly Ayotte publicly called for her resignation. Subers, whose own decision the same review found equally unsupported by the evidence available to her, faced no comparable public accountability and remains a sitting judge.