On Tuesday morning a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours ushered in what will be a new recovery home in Rochester.

Dismas Home started operating out of Manchester, but they’ve expanded their services to Rochester, soon offering 28 beds between the two cities. Cheryll Andrews, executive director of Dismas Home of New Hampshire, said the goal is to one day put a home in every county in the state.

“Our founder, Julie McCarthy Brown wants a home in every county before she passes away,” Andrews said.

Dismas Home offers women who have been involved with the criminal justice system evidence-based substance use treatment programs and helps them establish independent living. Women who participate in Dismas Home can stay up to 15 months. The home is also staffed 24/7 and offers mental, behavioral, and physical health support.

Andrews said there’s already a waitlist to get in. The home gets referrals from court systems, county and state jails, and defense attorneys. They require people fill out an application, where they are vetted before becoming accepted into the program.

Andrews said Dismas Home differs from other treatment facilities that may work only with women with children by allowing women who don’t have children or aren’t with them to attend their program.

“We don’t serve women with children, we serve [women] who want them back,” Andrews said.

Andrews said about 67% of the women who enter the program complete it and 90% of those that do stay sober for the long term.

Alacia Linville graduated from Dismas Home’s program in Manchester. She was homeless when she went to jail in Belknap County in 2019. She said she had been to jail before for short periods of time but this time she was in for eight months for the sale of methamphetamine.

“After about my third month in, I started to think I need an aftercare plan,” Linville said. “I had gone to treatments numerous times and none of them had worked.”

Linville said a case manager referred her to Dismas Home in Manchester where she ended up staying over 15 months, starting in 2020.

She said she was hesitant at first. Manchester was the city she was using in, she hadn’t tried an aftercare program before and she thought it would end up being more of a transactional situation but she said she was surprised to find they gave her the help she needed.

“The support, that was different this time,” Linville said. “I was used to going into programs, getting the support, getting out – I was homeless again.”

Linville moved to Hampton after her time at Dismas Home and stayed at Magnolia House as she addressed other charges she had from Rockingham court. She said Dismas Home helped her navigate dealing with them.

She said it feels good to say she’s been sober. She said she has been since 2023 but found recovery in 2019. It was a year into her sobriety that she said she felt she knew she could continue to do it.

She now lives with her 2-year-old daughter Jocelyn and fiance in Newmarket.

“I look at my family today and I just can’t imagine, like ever moving backwards,” Linville said.

Dismas Home in Rochester is expected to start housing women in early August. The home still needs to be licensed, furnishings need to be placed and some construction is still undergoing.

Just like humans may err in recognizing faces, facial recognition technology (FRT) is not without its flaws. Multiple defendants have blamed the technology for wrongful arrests as more and more law enforcement agencies rely on the technology to identify suspects. Meanwhile, limits on its use vary from state to state and city to city. 

A ruling this week regarding a murder case in New Jersey, however, forces law enforcement to disclose how this technology is used in criminal investigations in the state. 

In State v. Tybear Miles, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors must disclose how FRT was used to identify defendant Tybear Miles, who had been charged with “first-degree murder and weapons offenses.”

The case stems from a 2021 fatal shooting in Jersey City. A day after the shooting, officers showed a confidential informant, who did not witness the incident, CCTV footage from a nearby location. The informant identified two males by their street names and Instagram usernames, according to the ruling. After the informant identified one of the males as “Fat Daddy,” police ran a photo from “Fat Daddy’s” Instagram page through a facial recognition module, which identified Miles as a potential match. 

The ruling notes that the state provided the defendant with two different FRT searches as part of discovery. One search, according to the ruling, “returned a list of ten possible ‘matches’ to the probe image of [the] defendant, with [the] defendant ranked as the eighth ‘match’ on the list of ten.” Another search “returned a list of ten possible ‘matches,’ with five different images of [the] defendant ranked in the first five positions.” 

Miles’ sister and ex-girlfriend both identified Miles from videos and still images from other nearby surveillance footage, according to the ruling. The ruling states that “no witness identified defendant as the shooter; there were several people near the victim while he was shot twice; and all of the police interviewees were shown video footage and still photographs from approximately ninety minutes before the murder and seven minutes before the murder.”

Miles’ defense demanded details about how FRT was used in the case, and the trial judge ordered prosecutors to hand over 13 items, citing precedent from an earlier case requiring prosecutors to hand over FRT discovery items, reported the New Jersey Monitor. 

In Wednesday’s ruling, the New Jersey Supreme Court partially upheld the lower court order, reported Reuters. Justice Douglas Fasciale wrote that the state is required to produce “discovery identifying the FRT tools and materials the State used in its investigation,” including the name and manufacturer of the software and publicly available information about its error rates. The state must also turn over items such as the original photograph used in the probe as part of discovery. The ruling does not, however, require the state to produce the “source code of the FRT algorithm and any similar proprietary information applicable to the FRT utilized by the State,” but, if warranted, a defendant could pursue a discovery request for the proprietary information. 

“The right to a fair trial is guaranteed under the Federal and State Constitutions, and due process compels the State to disclose evidence favorable to an accused,” asserts the ruling. 

The New Jersey Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief in the case, praised the ruling, and one of its attorneys called it a “major victory for civil liberties,” adding it is “one of the first state high court rulings of its kind.” Some states, including Maryland, Montana, and Washington, require law enforcement agencies to disclose the use of FRT to defendants before trial, but few laws and court rulings provide guidance about how the technology is used in the criminal justice system. Regardless of Miles’ guilt or innocence, the ruling is an encouraging sign that more states may recognize the need for transparency regarding FRT as law enforcement increasingly relies on the technology to track and identify suspects.

Maria Bartiromo reports on House Speaker Mike Johnson sending representatives home early as Republican hardliners stall floor activities, refusing votes without action on the SAVE America Act.

House Speaker Mike Johnson sent representatives home early as hardline Republicans stalled floor activities, demanding action on the SAVE America Act. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, urging House Republicans to unify and avoid giving power to Democrats. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) labels the stalling tactics ‘foolish,’ emphasizing the need for legislative progress and appropriations.