State of New Hampshire v. Ian Todd MacDonald

THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

SUPREME COURT

In Case No. 2024-0292, State of New Hampshire v. Ian Todd MacDonald, the court on August 20, 2025, issued the following order:

The court has reviewed the written arguments and the record submitted on appeal, and has determined to resolve the case by way of this order. See Sup. Ct. R. 20(3). The defendant, Ian Todd MacDonald, appeals his conviction, following a bench trial in the Circuit Court (Zaino, J.), on a charge of criminal contempt for knowingly violating a no-contact provision of a criminal sentencing order that had been issued following his conviction in an earlier case for violating a civil stalking protective order. The defendant further appeals a finding of "true" on a charge of violating the "good conduct" term of his probation for engaging in the same conduct. The defendant argues that the evidence was insufficient to establish that he violated the relevant provisions, and that the trial court erred by stating that the date or time of the offense were not elements that the State was required to prove. We affirm. A challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence raises a question of law that we review de novo. State v. Seibel, 174 N.H. 440, 445 (2021). When considering a challenge to the sufficiency of evidence to support a conviction, we objectively review the entire record, construing the evidence, and all reasonable inferences from it, in the light most favorable to the State, and determine whether any rational trier of fact could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Id. We examine each item of evidence in the context of the entire case, not in isolation. Id. The trier of fact is entitled to draw reasonable inferences from the facts proved as well as from facts found as the result of other inferences so long as they can reasonably be drawn therefrom. See id. The defendant bears the burden of demonstrating that the evidence was insufficient to prove guilt. State v. Saintil-Brown, 172 N.H. 110, 117 (2019). When the evidence as to one or more of the elements is solely circumstantial, the defendant must establish that the evidence does not exclude all reasonable conclusions except guilt. Id. The proper analysis is not whether every possible conclusion consistent with innocence has been excluded, but whether all such reasonable conclusions based on the evidence have been excluded. Id. When solely circumstantial evidence is at issue, "the critical question is whether, even assuming all credibility resolutions in favor of the State, the inferential chain of circumstances is of sufficient strength that guilt is the sole rational conclusion." Seibel, 174 N.H. at 445 (quotation omitted).

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"To prove indirect criminal contempt, the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of a valid order, the defendant's knowledge of the order, and the defendant's intentional failure to comply with the order."

State v. Vincelette, 172 N.H. 350, 355 (2019). To establish a violation of the good conduct condition of the defendant's probation, the State must prove by a preponderance of the evidence either the fact of a criminal conviction for the acts constituting the violation or the defendant's commission of the underlying acts. State v. Kelly, 159 N.H. 390, 391 (2009).

Viewed most favorably to the State, see Seibel, 174 N.H. at 445, the evidence establishes the following facts. The defendant is a physical therapist with a clinical office in Manchester. At trial, the State presented evidence that he had one employee. The victim is the defendant's former patient, as well as his former business contact. At some point, their relationship developed into a friendship, and the victim shared with the defendant her personal email address. The victim terminated their friendship in early 2022, however, after she began to see "red flags" and evidence that the defendant's intent for their relationship did not match her intent.

Following the termination of the parties' friendship, the victim filed a civil stalking petition against the defendant. As part of the stalking case, the trial court issued a temporary protective order on August 23, 2022. In September, the defendant violated the protective order by coming within 300 feet of the victim's residence, a residence to which she had moved without disclosing its location to the defendant, leading to his arrest and incarceration. The defendant pleaded guilty to the crime, resulting in a sentencing order requiring, among other things, a two-year term of probation with electronic monitoring. The sentencing order also prohibited the defendant from having any contact with the victim, "includ[ing] via mail, telephone, fax, electronic communications, sending or delivering gifts, through a [third] party or any other method unless specifically authorized by the Court," and from

"interfering with [the victim] at her residence, school or place of employment." Shortly thereafter, the victim reported to the defendant's probation officer that her tires had been slashed and that she suspected the defendant was responsible. The victim explained that there had been prior incidents involving slashed tires for which she believed the defendant was responsible. The probation officer determined, however, that at the time when the victim's tires were slashed, the defendant's electronic monitoring data did not show that he was in the vicinity of her car. The victim continued to maintain contact with the probation officer from October through November 2022, periodically requesting that he provide her updates.

Although the sentencing order provided the probation officer with discretion to terminate the defendant's electronic monitoring, it required

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advance notice to the victim, and on November 29, 2022, the probation officer notified the victim that he intended to terminate the defendant's electronic monitoring at the end of December. This notification upset the victim, and in November and December, she expressed her concerns to the probation officer, asserting that it was too soon to remove the electronic monitoring, and arguing why it should continue.

Earlier in 2022, around the time when the victim's friendship with the defendant ended, the victim began working remotely for a California-based company that provides a software service and web platform to property managers. The plaintiff did not disclose the employment to the defendant. She had, however, listed it on her publicly available profile on "LinkedIn." On December 21, 2022, at approximately 10:11 a.m., someone submitted an electronic form to the victim's employer through its website, identifying the submitting party's name as the victim's name, and populating the email address field with the victim's personal email address. The victim had not submitted the form. The submitting party populated the "subject" field of the form with the word, "lying," and the "description" field with the words, "How can I stop being an ugly c*nt b*tch?"

The electronic submission resulted in a support "ticket" that was routed to a customer support specialist located in Georgia. Although the customer support specialist did not know the victim and had never met her, he recognized her name as the name of another employee of the company. Because he was concerned that the security of the victim's account may have been compromised, and out of concern about the abusive and targeted nature of the language in the ticket, the customer support specialist alerted the victim about the ticket. Technical information associated with the ticket showed that it had been submitted from the vicinity of Manchester, New Hampshire, and revealed the submitting party's "IP address," or "internet protocol address" — a unique code associated with a device that is connected to the internet so that online information may be routed to that device.

The victim suspected that the defendant had submitted the ticket because he knew her personal email address, and because she was not aware of anyone else who had "issues with" her that would provide incentive to submit such a request using her personal information. Accordingly, she called the local police that day and reported the incident, providing the responding officer with the information from the ticket.

When questioned, the defendant admitted to the officer that he knew the victim's personal email address. Through publicly available information, the responding officer was able to identify the internet service provider associated with the IP address of the party who had submitted the ticket. When the responding officer prepared his report, however, he inadvertently wrote the date

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of the incident as December 20 rather than December 21, 2022. Accordingly, when a detective subsequently prepared a subpoena to the internet service provider for information regarding the IP address, the detective requested information regarding the customer to whom the IP address was assigned at 12:00 p.m. on December 20, 2022, not December 21, 2022. Likewise, when the criminal complaint and probation violation notice were initially pleaded, the State alleged that the defendant submitted the ticket on December 20, 2022, not December 21, 2022. Prior to trial, however, the trial court amended both pleadings, at the State's request and with the defendant's assent, to allege that the defendant submitted the ticket on December 21.

The custodian of the records for the internet service provider testified at trial that on December 20, 2022, at 12:00 p.m., the IP address associated with the ticket was issued to a device connected to the provider's network through the defendant's modem at his physical therapy clinic in Manchester. The custodian further testified that for the defendant's business, the provider utilized a "dynamic host configuration protocol," meaning that a new IP address would be assigned every time that a device connected to the provider's network through the defendant's modem. The defendant's probation officer testified that the defendant was at his Manchester clinic on December 20. The defendant argued that the evidence did not establish that he was the person who had submitted the ticket in part because it did not prove that the IP address was still associated with his physical therapy office, or that he was there, on December 21. At the sentencing hearing, the trial court explained that in convicting him of criminal contempt and finding the probation violation charge to be "true," "a significant factor" was that "time is not an element of the offense, nor is the date." On appeal, the defendant argues that "[t]here is no proof that the referenced IP address belonged to" him at 10:11 a.m. on December 21, 2022, and that, even if the IP address was assigned to his physical therapy business on December 21, there was no proof that he was at the office on that date or that the device from which the ticket was submitted was associated with him. The defendant further argues that the date and time of the ticket were required elements of the State's proof. We disagree. Viewed most favorably to the State, see id., the evidence establishes a highly contentious relationship between the defendant and victim, culminating in the defendant researching and finding the victim's undisclosed home address, coming within 300 feet of it in violation of a court order, and being convicted, incarcerated, and subjected to electronic monitoring as a result. The defendant's conviction was approximately three months prior to the December 21 incident, and when his probation officer indicated a willingness to terminate his electronic monitoring only a few weeks before December 21, the victim objected and argued that it was too soon. The victim had also recently accused the defendant of slashing her tires. The subject of the ticket was

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"lying," its tone was angry, it was submitted to the victim's employer, and the person who submitted it used the victim's name and personal email address. The defendant knew the victim's personal email address, and no one other than the defendant had issues with her that would have provided motive to pose as her and send a hate-filled message to her employer. The IP address associated with the ticket had been assigned to a device that was connected to the internet through the defendant's office modem less than twenty-four hours earlier. Evidence at trial established that the defendant worked at that office and had one employee.

On this evidence, the sole rational conclusion is that it was the defendant who submitted the ticket from that device, which remained connected to the internet through the defendant's modem less than twenty-four hours later. See id. The defendant's suggestions that the IP address could have been reassigned to a different customer of his internet service provider, or that the ticket could have been submitted through his modem but from someone other than him, are not reasonable. See id.

We reject the defendant's argument that the date and time that he submitted the ticket were elements of the criminal contempt or probation violation charges that the State was required to prove. See State v. Homo, 132 N.H. 514, 519 (1989). We note, however, that the pleadings were amended with the defendant's assent to allege that the offenses occurred on December 21, 2022, and as discussed above, the evidence establishes that the defendant in fact committed the offenses on that date.

Affirmed.

MacDonald, C.J., and Donovan and Countway, JJ., concurred.

Timothy A. Gudas, Clerk