Washington ? A key overseer of the Bush administration’s unsuccessful efforts to create a more comprehensive screening process for airline passengers resigned in disgrace four years ago from the New Hampshire Supreme Court to avoid prosecution over his conduct on the bench.

W. Stephen Thayer III, who left New Hampshire’s high court in 2000 under a deal with prosecutors, now is serving as deputy chief of the Transportation Security Administration’s Office of National Risk Assessment.

Thayer resurrected his public career with a stint at a conservative political group in Washington before landing the job last summer where he oversees the administration’s Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System. The project encountered such technical difficulty and so much resistance from privacy advocates that it was sent back to the drawing board earlier this month.

The project, which was known as CAPPS II, was to develop software to bar any passenger from getting on an airplane if a computer analysis of unidentified government terrorist watchlists and private commercial electronic records judged him or her to be a security threat. The project has been sharply criticized by congressional auditors.

“To appoint someone who had to resign in public disgrace in lieu of being indicted is incredibly offensive,” said Charles Lewis, executive director the Center for Public Integrity, a private ethics watchdog. CAPPS II has been “one of the most sensitive projects in the U.S. government,” because “we are talking about data-mining the records of millions of Americans. The people in charge have got to be beyond reproach in every way.”

Thayer declined to be interviewed.

But TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said Thayer was qualified for the job because he helped the American Conservative Union organize a task force with other conservative and liberal groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, to lobby on the government’s handling of citizens’ personal information, including CAPPS II.

“That was as direct involvement in that field as you can get,” Hatfield said.

Hatfield said the New Hampshire controversy was reviewed by those who appointed Thayer and posed no bar to his getting the federal job because no charges were filed and no action was taken against him by the state judicial conduct committee or the bar association.

Thayer’s fast-moving legal career — U.S. attorney at 35, state supreme court justice at 40 — came to an abrupt halt March 31, 2000, when he resigned from the state’s highest court in a deal with New Hampshire Atty. Gen. Philip McLaughlin.

In return for Thayer’s resignation, McLaughlin agreed to drop plans to indict him. In a public report, McLaughlin criticized Thayer for participating in deliberations on a case he was recused from. He also said he would have sought felony or misdemeanor charges against Thayer for allegedly trying to influence the choice of a judge to hear his wife’s appeal of their divorce and threatening fellow justices if they allowed his conduct to be reported to judicial oversight groups.