Update: New Plea Deals and Charges

Yeah, so Operation Night Cat was like one of the largest poaching cases in New Hampshire state history.

New Hampshire Fish and Game found that five men had killed dozens of animals out of season at night through illegal baiting.

All of these are violations of the state's hunting laws and also in some cases federal laws.

And then it turned out that four of these guys were also current or former corrections officers in the New Hampshire men's prison.

And they were also allegedly doing some shady stuff inside the prison.

But at the end of the day, most of the accountability was handled at the state level through hunting violations.

So fines, losing their hunting or trapping privileges for a period of time.

And the feds, they were supposed to be handling the bigger charges.

But if you remember, as of last fall, those indictments had yet to come down.

And this was like a big thing for Ron Arsenault, the lead investigator on the case, who by the end of our story had essentially lost hope that anything would happen and also kind of lost faith in the system altogether.

And after going through all of it, you know, at the end of the day, I don't know if I'd do it again because of all the stuff that just happens.

It's like, you just did all that work for what?

Yeah, Ron was so disappointed that these guys got off basically with some fines and loss of hunting privileges.

And he had, as you said, given up hope on this idea there were going to be federal charges on the poaching stuff.

But now...

There's been some movement on that, right? So what happened?