Meetings
Transcript: Select text below to play or share a clip
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Welcome back, folks. This is House Corrections and Institutions. It is Wednesday, February 18. We are shifting gears. We are working on the issue of pretrial supervision and how do we go forward and restart this program. We've spent conversations about the current structure isn't working well. There could be some changes to it to make it look a little better, maybe even have a different term than pre trial supervision. There is a role there for our courts, our state prosecutors, and defense counsel, as well as DOC. And so, House Judiciary has been working on this as we have. So, where we were last time, we had a draft that incorporated both the Council of State Governments recommends and also the administration recommends. Well, we never really got to look at that draft because things kind of took a 90 degree turn, where we had a committee conversation, and we're thinking about scrapping part of that program, reconfiguring it, figuring out what to do. House judiciary felt the same way as we did. So they are working on H529. We do not physically have the bill. They physically have the bill. Representative Luneau and I worked with Hillary in terms of possibly putting out a new draft in terms of how can we reconfigure the pretrial supervision. Also here, we need to also have a conversation with DOC on the big bill because there is 200,000 that's being appropriated or being asked by the administration to appropriate to BGS to bring on seven permanent positions to staff this pretrial supervision. We have a lot of questions about that. We also are questioning if you expand the accountability court to sort of tied in with this whole pretrial supervision. I'm just using that with quotes. We expand the accountability court statewide. Is it gonna What courts are gonna be standing us up? It's one day a week in certain courts. We're an accountability docket. What is DOC's role in that as well? So we've got a lot of layers to work through with you. It's gonna be really complicated. So what I'd like to do is get started with this new draft that Hillary has worked with Representative Luneau and a little bit with me. And Hillary, it's all yours. Good luck.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: For the record, Hillary Chittenden Ames for the Office of Legislative Counsel. So we have draft 1.1 of a strike all amendment to H529. This is the language that House Judiciary is currently considering. Quick roadmap before we turn to the language. There are two main substantive changes that this amendment would make. The first is to remove the statutory eligibility requirements. So that's currently in statute. Someone has to violate a condition of release or have five pending dockets to be eligible to be placed in the program, the bill would remove that requirement from the statute. And the second substantive change is that in current, under current law, a court may issue an arrest warrant if an individual commits multiple violations of supervision requirements, and the bill would change multiple to one or more. So multiple requires more than one and the change would require one or more, or make that an option for one or more violations of supervision requirements. So those are the two key substantive changes. I will flag that there are two policy issues that are in the House bill, but are very much your committee territory. So these two pieces of language were in this committee's draft committee bill, and that is for pretrial supervision officer caseload. So I'll flag that when we get to it. And the second is requiring interagency coordination regarding provision of behavioral health services. So those are the two things that House Judiciary has from this committee's draft bill, but very much a policy decision for this committee whether to include and whether modified or not. So those are the changes. I will also flag that there are some changes not intended to be substantive to make the blow of the procedure for referral and assessment in the program a little clearer to read. Some concerns that it was not straightforward as previously drafted. So I'll flag those changes. Again, those were not intended to be substantive. So to the extent that witnesses have any concerns about something affecting a substantive change, happy to hear that and we can adjust. So any questions before we dive into the language? All right. So on page one, we've got several changes to subdivision A and B. These are just technical. You've seen these before. These were in the committee bill. The first key substantive change is on page one, lines 19 through 21. You'll see that the language is stricken or have been charged with violating a condition of release or have not fewer than five pending dockets. So that's effectuating that first key substantive change, removing eligibility requirements that someone be charged with violating a condition of release or have five or more pending dockets.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Moving forward to page two.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Let's make it
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: a little clearer so the committee knows what's at play here. So court would order a person into this program if the person posed a risk of nonappearance, a risk of flight, or a risk of endangering the public. I It would not require a person to have five or more pending dockets. And it would not require a person to have been charged with filing a conditional release. There would still be in place, pose a risk of non appearance. If you read the language on the bottom of page one, you're striking out twenty and twenty one part of it, but it goes on to say pose a risk of, and it's on the top of page two, lines one and two. So who would determine if they pose a risk of non appearance or a risk of flight or risk of endangering the public? Who determines that to court? Yes, because remember that when we're talking about the pretrial supervision program, this is a condition of release. So a court is determining whether
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: this can be justified under the terms of ordering conditions of release. And that's where that kind of pose a risk of non appearance, risk of flight or risk of endangering the public language comes from. Because under section 7,554, there are various options or conditions of release tied to those
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: justifications. It's not a sentence. Correct. House supervision is not a sentence. It is part of a condition of a person's release back into the community, they have not been convicted. They've been charged and arraigned. It's to provide supervision of that person to abide by other conditions that have been set as well by the court. So the pretrial supervision, however we want to term it, is a condition of a person's release. Okay. And the court states that it's from the court.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Moving forward on page two, you'll see that there is language stricken on lines five through 17. That is not stricken from the statute, that is just moved. I will point out where when we get there. The request from the house judiciary folks was to make the procedure a little more chronological. So walk through how does referral happen, what does DOC do, then what does the court do. And so you'll see that in subdivision or subsection D, this draft essentially reorders some of the existing provisions to walk through that. The language that is new, this is on page two, line 17 through 18 are not new, you've seen this before, but this is one of the two policy questions for the committee. The suggestion to implement a CSG recommendation was to add that the department shall maintain a target caseload of not more than 20 defendants for each pretrial supervision officer. There was a question last time about statutory caseload requirements. So in 20 VSA 105, there are a number of requirements related to caseload capacity for corrections officers. I will direct all of your specific questions to our DOC witnesses in the room afterwards. But as drafted from a pure statutory drafting perspective, there isn't a conflict, but useful to ask DOC at some point whether they see any concerns in having both of these pieces of language from a practical perspective. Being complex.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: Yes. Hillary, just the way it's written, right? So you have more people eligible than 20? Or else what? Sort of the idea. If you have language like this and it's a shall, right? It's not like it'll try to. It shall. So if they more, do they not get supervised?
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: The idea was the word target is doing that work there. So as opposed to shall supervise not more than 20 defendants, which would be a pure shall, bar, really unfair what happens if there are more than 20 to be supervised. Target would implement the policy recommendation that 20 is an effective caseload, but does not set a strict 20 bar.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: So in actuality, it's do your best, right? But
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I think we may want to work this because I'm concerned about the other part of statute that requires caseloads. Yes, that works.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Policy question, whether to include it, how many, and I think very open to modifying this language to match up with section nine zero five. But I think other witnesses here today might be able to answer.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: The other thing, I wanna go back up to lines three through five. And this is something I would ask that DOC be prepared to weigh in. So the Department of DOC is gonna assign pretrial supervision officers to monitor defendants in the designated region of Vermont. Okay? So my understanding is you currently have about two or three already on board, and we need to know where they are. We need to know what the cost of that is because there's been previous money appropriated for this. And then if the thinking is that we actually have a pretrial supervision officer housed in that courtroom, wherever that court with the accountability docket for that one day, can those current folks that are current pretrial supervision officers be used? And if so, then do we need all seven that are being proposed in the big bill from the governor's office? So there's moving pieces here for that. So I just wanna flag that for DOC to weigh in on, because that will determine the money piece. That makes sense to the committee?
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Moving forward with subsection D, which is procedure. As mentioned, this draft makes changes to how the procedure is described. These are not intended to be substantive changes. This is just for a clearer chronology of the steps. Witness testimony very welcome if this in fact appears to affect a substantive change. That's not the intent. So would want to avoid that. But procedure, this is subdivision one, the new language would read, At arraignment or at a subsequent hearing, the court may, on motion of the prosecutor or the defendant or on the court's own motion, request that the Department of Corrections review and determine the appropriate level of supervision for the defendant. So just like current law, it's saying either of the parties or the court can move for someone to be considered for referral. And that functions the request to DOC two. Doesn't change anything. Doesn't change. Just trying to say it in a clearer fashion. Subdivision 2A, this is now page three, line five, lines five and six. The new language would read, if requested by the court, the Department of Corrections shall determine the appropriate level of supervision using evidence based screening of the defendant. And it goes on to list the supervision levels. This language is the language from page two that was previously in subdivision C2, but it's placing it kind of where chronologically it happens or if considered. The one change, the one language change that I noticed in preparing for the walk through, When moved, this does not include some language about screening of those defendants eligible to be placed in the program. I think the thought was that because the draft removed statutory eligibility requirements, that language was not necessary. But my understanding is that DOC policy also refers to some DOC eligibility requirements. So curious to hear from witnesses about any concerns about removing that language. That would be an easy fix.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We need to have some form of screening because that's what DOC, they do that screening to determine what level of supervision. But again, this is going to be tied into a different, possibly a higher risk community, a higher risk person coming in than what is current in statute. But you could have, just because someone has five pending dockets or more doesn't mean that they are high risk. It's just that they're circling through the courts a lot. So by taking that away, it's really gonna depend on a person's risk level. You have to go back to the top of page two, it's gonna depend on their risk of non appearance, their risk of flight, or the risk of endangering the public. So that's gonna possibly be a whole different caliber of folks coming into the system. And DOC is gonna need to look at this through their screening lens to then determine what type of supervision would be done. And possibly because the person could be much higher risk, maybe the telephone monitoring system would not be appropriate. So maybe it would need to be in person meetings only. And that's where we need to talk with DOC about. The other piece that's playing into this, if we do house those pretrial supervision officer, if we can actually put an office, DOC in the courtroom that one day that there's an accountability for. The thinking is that that officer could hook the defendant up with all the provider services that might be in the community, just as they do with the accountability court in Chittenden County. That's a question we need to ask, is that feasible for that to happen? For our supervising officer to do that? If that happens, and that can happen, then how do you deal with the supervision piece of that person while they're out in the community? What kind of DOC supervise that person if all the providers are providing wraparound services? That's the other piece we're gonna have to work with. Does that make sense? Because maybe they don't need as much supervision out there if you've got your social services partners working with the person. Because that's what they found in Chittenden accountability for. That's why there's only one person under the pretrial supervision because everyone else was having most support systems in the community and they didn't need to be supervised with DOC. That's why there was only one person. It's really changing the focus of this program. So Brian, you had your hand up.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah. I'm trying not to go up the works, but I think my brain is on a lag. I'm looking at page So it's the previous point. It's page two, line 20 to page three, line four. And the change in language there, I thought I understood to be just can't remember exactly how it was described, but it looks to me like it changes the the entity that's doing the assessing of the appropriateness of this person from the court to DOC.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: It is not. So there are two or it should not. There are two things that happen. The first is that the court is the one that can order this as a condition of release. Courts determine conditions of release, not DOC. But DOC has some requirements. I think I can be corrected by folks in there who know better, but someone has to be a Vermont resident to be able to be supervised. And so DOC does need to be able to tell the court, Yes, we can supervise this person. No, we can't. And based on our policy laying out a kind of grid of risk and supervision level, here's our recommendation for what supervision would look like for this person. So kind of
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: like Port says yes or no, and then DOC said too what they're gonna need given that you've said yes? Okay, thanks.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's just really in a way, belts and suspenders. If you go down to lines six through eight, it says the DOC would determine the appropriate level of supervision using evidence based screening of the defendant. So it's kind of saying the same thing. DOC has to review and determine what is the appropriate level of supervision for that defendant. They currently do that anyway. If someone is out on furlough, if they're doing any electronic monitoring for folks, they do that now. And that's why we picked up that language for them to do it for folks on pretrial supervision when we put the law in place.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yep. Rain's caught up. Thank you.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Moving forward, again, the statute sets out what DOC supervision levels might include, but it's DOC policy that actually spells out what the evidence based screening looks like and other details about supervision. And I'll let other witnesses speak to any questions you have about that. Moving forward on the bill draft, this is page three, lines 16 through 19. This is the second place where current law references the statutory eligibility requirements that a person is eligible for pretrial supervision if they have violated conditions of release or have not fewer than five pending dockets. So this is, again, that first substantive change the bill proposes to make, is remove those two eligibility requirements from statute. We've made it through the bulk of the markup, but moving
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: forward to page four,
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: there's one grammatical change on line four to add will reasonably ensure. And because of the formatting change, some of the subdivisions are renumerated. If you look on lines 16 through 18 of page four, when placing a defendant into the program, the court shall issue an order that sets the defendant's level of supervision based on the recommendations submitted by the Department of Corrections. That is not new language. Again, that was previously in the introductory subsection C, and now we're including it at the end of our new procedure walkthrough with the idea that tell the court about what the order does at the step in the procedure where the court is issuing the order. So that's why we've moved it to the end. Any questions about that? Any of those changes in the procedure section? Again, those are not intended to be substantive. These are intended for readability. So if there are any questions about whether they do not effectuate that, very welcome. All right, moving forward. We're now on page five. This section, this is subsection e. This section is talking about compliance and review. So what pretrial supervision officers have to do, can do if someone violates program conditions. This draft proposes to leave much of that alone. It removed some of the language that both committee bills were considering related to pretrial supervision officers being able to report directly to the court. But it does make one change. This is on lines 12 through 13 of page five. So current law upon submission of officer's sworn affidavit by the prosecutor, the court may issue a warrant for the arrest of a defendant who fails to report to the pretrial supervision officer, commits under current law, multiple violations of supervision requirements or has absconded. So those are three scenarios under which the court may issue an arrest warrant for a defendant. And the bill proposes to change one of those circumstances where the court can issue an arrest warrant from when someone commits multiple violations to if they commit one or more. So it's potentially lowering the number of violations that could give rise to an arrest warrant being issued.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And it would be violations of those conditions of release that the court has set, not violations to administrative procedure in terms of DOC that they may have when they're supervising someone, such as if there's an electronic monitoring and the person cuts off the bracelet. That's a violation of the DOC's administrative requirement. It's not a violation of the condition of release.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I recall witness testimony to that effect. One note about this section, though, is that it's violations of supervision requirements, which is, at least on its face, necessarily conditioned. That's different than conditions of release. So I actually think that's a broader term that could include both. And if that is not true, that would be great to hear from witnesses so that we could make sure that that section If
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: you go up to line four through six Mhmm. Internal officers may notify prosecutor and use reason to to notify the defendant any violations of department imposed administrative conditions. Yep. Committed by the defendant. That's where we addressed if they cut off the bracelet. That's not a violation per se of the court condition of release. It is a violation of DOC's administrative procedures. Yes. Because that's currently their violations anyway in the electronic monitoring system.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: In that particular case,
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: it's also a new crime.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: In which case?
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: In the example that you're using now.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Destruction of our property. That's not the testimony we received when we put this in place a couple years ago. Or was it the distinction between if the battery dies versus cutting it? Is that your point, commissioner? Or Yeah. Because there are some administrative procedures that DOC has for some of their supervision. The testimony we received a few years ago, and that's why we had section two for that.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Kevin? Why don't we want what I consider teeth in that if they cut the
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It'll be cutting. I mean, if the battery dies or something, it may be cutting, I use yeah. There's two different things For that, because you're right, cutting is a real violation.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It's a new prime. Yeah. State property.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Which would likely constitute a violation of conditions of release, which my understanding generally include not commit further.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: Yeah, correct.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Looking to others, but
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: a battery issue is different then. Yes, would not.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: That can be a good faith issue.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It could be an equipment issue on DOC's end. I can understand not wanting a person to be remanded for example for that kind of error particularly if it were on DOC's end.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Because it's up to DOC to make sure the battery
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: is Affirmative. It's still optional, and then we've issued a piece of equipment that does what it's supposed
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: to do. Thank you for that clarification first. Since they're cutting it off, that's not a good sign.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Alright. Moving forward, there are two more things to touch on briefly, and then happy to answer any final questions. This is page six, lines four through seven. This is a new subsection. This was in the previous committee draft bill trying to effectuate a CSG recommendation regarding interagency coordination for provision of behavioral health services. So this language is the same as what this committee has already seen in the draft corrections committee bills, Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health shall coordinate with the Department of Corrections to provide timely referrals to behavioral health services for defendants supervised under the program. Again, policy question for this committee, whether to include this kind of requirement.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: Sorry, Hillary, just going down to age, and I know that's existing language there, but hoping you can go full lawyer on this one and help me get through it. Okay, so a pilot project is one thing, right? To roll something out in the county, I think. But by saying if the program is not operating in a particular county, the court shall not order pretrial supervision feels to me like an equity issue. If I build up a pile of cases in Washington, I essentially have unequal access to a different type of justice there, where I could be in a cell in one county, and I could be in the community in another county. Are there any sort of, Does that conflict with anything as far as being equal throughout Vermont for residents?
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Can I answer that one? I don't know why that language
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: If we said no. Chair, you
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: are welcome.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: We
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: purposely put in that language because we knew it was not going to be fully funded. And we didn't even know if it was going to be even funded because the appropriations bill was still being worked through the process. And we were concerned that knowing it wouldn't be fully funded, there wasn't the expectation that this program would be available to all the counties. So we didn't want this program to be set up at the beginning in all the counties, knowing there wasn't gonna be the appropriate funding to hire the supervision officers. So that's why we did it because we didn't want that expectation to be out there. There was a need of about $1.21300000.0 to fully fund it so it could be rolled out in all the counties. It ended up being only about 600,000. So that's why with this piece, we were very clear not to set up that expectation because the money wasn't supposed to be there.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: But I feel like this is expanding beyond the pilot now, right? And now is there a liability with having someone treated differently based
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: on what county they go through with this? So this language would have to definitely be looked.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: My full lawyer initial responses, I'm happy to look more and get back to
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: you.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: That's a very lawyerly response. Yes.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I will I will
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: do It
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: does not immediately spark thoughts about exactly what a claim would look like challenging this, but
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: think regarding minds four through seven on page six, so how does that work exactly, the coordination with behavioral health services? How does it work?
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's testimony that we would take in to answer that.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: For that, the shall coordinate language is kind of the statutory trigger for the agencies to then meet, have an MOU talk, figure out what that looks like. And to the extent your question is about that
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Yes. And that's important.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah. That would be for another risk. Right. Wrapping up, this is page six. Line 17, effective date is set for 07/01/2026. And just noting that on lines 18 through 19, because the content of the amendment expands a little bit what was in the original House bill, this amendment would also amend the title to make sure that it accurately reflected the contents of the new proposal. Any final questions about this new house judiciary language? Makes a few substantive changes, has two policy questions for this committee to determine, and then has a few intended to be non substantive changes to make the procedure section a little clear to me.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: So going back to Joe, on page six, four to seven, and this just is probably me not knowing, but I'm gonna ask the question, do we have the capacity in, you know, to to give people these referrals? Are there people out there who can help these people? Is there enough of them? Can they handle it? Are they maxed out?
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's gonna be the question that we will ask folks when we haven't come in to test ify on this piece. We could ask Department of Mental Health, we can ask Department of Health and DOC. But the thinking, again, goes back to expand the accountability docket Other parts of the state. Right now, it was in an area that was rich in terms of community providers. Yes, we do. Where the accountability docket gets rolled out to. If it's up in the Northeast Kingdom, it would be difficult for community providers. If it's down in the Rutland Court, Windsor Court, or Bennington Court, or Wyndham Court, there may be more services there. So it's gotta depend where that accountability docket gets rolled out to. And will also depend if we can house a DOC supervising officer in that courtroom for that one day a week, but then has the relationship with their community providers, their partners to help that coordination. There's a lot. There's a lot there. And I'm not clear where the accountability docket is gonna be rolled out. I don't think anyone is clear on where it's gonna be, what courts. And the plan is one day a week. And I don't think anyone is clear if there's going to be an increased cost to the judiciary for this or not, because we're hearing, well, they're already doing some of this anyway. And all we're doing is carving out one day that these cases will be fast tracked. Is that gonna increase requirements in the judiciary for more staff, another judge? Is that gonna put more pressure on the state's attorneys? Is it gonna put more pressure on the defense? Is it gonna put more pressure on PLC? All that has to be answered to figure out how many courts are going to be doing this.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: And just to be clear, as a reminder,
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: I'm sure folks
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: remember that the accountability docket and pretrial supervision program are separate and different tools. They were moved both to Chittenden and had some overlapping requirements. So there was a kind of dovetail there. But changes that you make to this section are just to pretrial supervision program as a tool. I understand that in a world of finite resources, there are questions about which tool to use and to what extent with the resources that you have. But just when we're talking about the statutory language here, it is just for how the pretrial supervision program as a court ordered condition of release operates.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: I think I understand what we're trying to do. But to make sure I do, page one, line 21. I'm understanding it to say, defendants who pose a, and I put minimal or reasonable risk of non appearance, risk of flight, risk of endangering the public. Am I understanding what it's saying?
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: By adding those modifiers. Those modifiers were in there.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Is that a correct understanding of what we're trying to do here?
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Another one is gonna give you more concrete answers. That language is pulled from seventy five fifty four, which are the conditions of release for purposes of whether someone is held pending trial. I would have to look at 70 five-fifty four to see whether it says reasonable or substantial, but it
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Yeah, I'm not hung up on those particular words. I just wanna make sure that I'm understanding. Because what I think we're saying is if there isn't a risk of bad appearance or flight or a danger to the public, then we can consider pretrial supervision. If there's a risk of any of those, then they would not be eligible. It's the other way around.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Just to clarify. So the only way under the Vermont constitution and our current laws for a court to order participation in the pretrial supervision program as a condition of release is if a defendant meets one of those conditions. And it's the least restrictive condition on that person that will ensure they return to court or as needed to protect the child.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: In order to be part of the In order to be supervised in the community after arraignment, court needs to determine that the person poses a risk of non appearance for their next court hearing, a risk of flight, they're gonna abscond and not show up to court, what it is, it's not showing up to court, the next court, or risk of endangering.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah, the Vermont constitutional baseline is people are not held pending trial unless they are charged with very serious crimes. And the way that the law sets out the conditions under which someone might be released into the community, it's based on their risk of not returning to court primarily and then also as needed to protect the public.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: This fail is set. Risk of flight.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: We have Kim McManus with us, who I believe walks the committee through this in a far better fashion than I could. So I
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: will defer other
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: questions on the details.
[Hillary Chittenden Ames, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Anything further from me? I don't
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: think so. I don't know.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Thanks, Hillary.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Thank you. So I know the commissioner is on a tight schedule. So you wanna come up?
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: Yes, ma'am.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: I don't have any sort of prepared remarks. I'm just here to answer questions. Don't we? Yes.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We had some questions at work.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: We did.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: So
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: don't
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: know where to start. Just don't know where to start. Would it be feasible, I'm just gonna, would it be feasible we restructure the approach to the accountability docket? And we roll this out, I'm going to say to four courts this next fiscal year. Would it be feasible to have a person from your PMP who's a supervisor, supervision officer, physically housed in that courtroom bed one day a week, that that accountability docket is worked on.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: Yes. The you know, I I don't want to speak for what does come next for the accountability court. That's outside my purview. I can talk about what worked in Burlington, and we did have somebody there. We had three terrific members of our Burlington Probation and Parole Office, the district manager, Glenn Boyd, an assistant manager, Maria Goodleski, and then Nate Hudak, and Nate was there quite often. What made Burlington work so well was the fact that it was five days a week, that it was a consistent and rapid churn. One of the reasons why I believe we did not see so much in the way of pretrial referral, there were six over the course of the court's lifespan thus far, and only one remains, is because prosecutor Waite moved people through that process so quickly so that people were finding resolution within days or weeks, not months or even years, as is currently the case for these individuals. Right? Some of these individuals, maybe not all five dockets that ultimately brought them to the list of eligible folks for the 3B courtroom, but certainly parts of those five dockets, one or two of those dockets had been lingering for literally years on some of these individuals. And so a huge part of it was the really sustained and intense application of attention to these cases five days a week for a relatively short period of time, total less than four months, I believe, what we're gonna see in the end, and yet it managed to eat away at a huge chunk of a backlog that had been noticeable and extant and really sort of worried over for a couple years now. So that was what worked in Burlington. Our role in that was to have a person who was dedicated to that position and dedicated to that work. The pretrial component did not end up being as large a component as we thought it might be, But again, I believe that's because of the speed of the process. However, of the 79 people, the data I have right now has 79 people who went through individuals representing seven zero two dockets, sixty one of those eventually went to DOC. That is not, they did not all go to prison by any means, about twenty seven percent went to be held in a facility, but seventy seven percent of that total number ended up under DOC's AGES, whether it's through being held in a facility or whether it's some form of probation. And there's a variety of different probation forms there, including split to serve or probation and also treatment court, but all of those do involve DOC efforts. And so while the number of people who were specifically ended up in pretrial was relatively small, the number of people who ended up being added to BUPP's caseload was substantial. And I think that we will see that if this court is replicated in other places, and that will only be more pronounced if it is replicated in a way that allows it to have that really focused attention over several days a week and over a short period of time, but really gets at whatever the respective backlog is to the places where it gets rolled out if it does get rolled out.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I'm trying to mesh this pretrial supervision with rolling out the accountability doc. That's what in my brain. That's what I'm trying to mesh. And it's not mesh. Because the pretrial supervision model is for folks that really have no services out there, services aren't being provided. What happened with the pilot project in Chittenden County, those services were, wraparound services were provided, and that's what we're looking to replicate.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: So, yes, ma'am. One of the effective things in Burlington was the fact that it wasn't just PPO Hudak who was there, it was also members of other departments in AHS who were routinely in the court and available for, I mean, honestly, a team member's perspective, it can be a sort of boring and sometimes not necessarily, does not, it may not seem like the best use of their time at times to be sitting in court waiting for the prosecutor to turn around, which he may or may not do, or for the defense to say, well, can we actually make some kind of referral immediately? But when that actually does happen, having them there is invaluable because they're there and it's immediate and it happens very quickly. And that did happen both with our part of AHS and with other departments in AHS. There's a lot of that kind of coordination. You're correct to say that that is technically separate from pretrial. I don't believe that pretrial is merely for people who aren't, who can't get services. I think it's for people who will not engage with services. And I also think that pretrial is for those who are falling between the cracks in the sense that their respective and cumulative offenses, alleged offenses at this stage, pretrial, are not rising to the level of priority for whichever prosecutorial office is looking at its own caseload and having to make decisions about which ones are the most important. And so you end up with folks whose cases are objectively not as important from a triage perspective, but who in the accumulation of those cases are tremendously important for the communities that they are impacting. That's where I believe pretrial is important. But that is separate from the 3B program as we saw it.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's where, I don't know where to go forward with this free trial supervision piece because a testimony that I think both committees have heard is there's more success in the expedited accountability talking. That's what I think both committees have heard. It's just my brain is mushed.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: It's hard for me to wrap my head around the policy without getting the money locked out. And I still don't think commissioner really have a good sense of how much is ongoing, what buckets it's coming from and what it's funding specifically. I don't know. I feel like we should almost write it on the board or something because I just don't have a handle. Hear 1,400,000.0, but then the appropriations language is 200,000 above the existing positions from last year from the vacancy pool. So do you mind just mapping it out piece by piece?
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: I believe the
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: larger amount was not about the docket or pretrial. It was about the medical piece and the availability of new kinds of treatment.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Oh, no. I think you're talking of pretrial supervision? Yeah. Yeah. Because what we did let me give background here. When we started this pretrial supervision, knowing we weren't gonna fully fund it, so that's why we said don't roll it In out in all the FY '25, there was 660,000 put in DOC's budget to roll this out in a limited way. In FY '26, there was another 650,000. So we're at 1,300,000.0 over two fiscal years. For FY 'twenty seven, there was 200,000 that the governor has proposed for seven additional positions, permanent positions for you folks in your probation parole. So the question is, is that 200,000 on top of the 1.3 that's already been appropriated so that we're at 1.5.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: I apologize.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We're not.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It is my understanding that we have, in fact, used those allocated funds in order to bring aboard people both in Newport and in BUPP.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what we need to know is of the appropriation in FY '25 and FY '26, how much is remaining? Cause you wouldn't have spent a full 1,300,000.0 on free staff. So there's gotta be some balance, some money balance there that we're adding the proposal to add the 200,000 to.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: We'll look at the 200 wouldn't cover seven either. So there's the money to supplement that.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: We can absolutely look into that for you and give you an answer and put it in what you're describing as a bucket and an idea of where did it go each year and to whom.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah, because the three three folks didn't consume 1,300,000. Over two years? For two years, no. No,
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: really shouldn't. Even with fringe, it should not be anywhere Is near
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: there any other cost involved with this within your office or your world of supervision? So we need to know what the balance remaining of FY '25 and FY '26 appropriations. And then we know what the base is there, which I'm assuming there would also be a base. Maybe is there another base of 650 Mhmm. In f y twenty seven that the 200,000 is on top of?
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: Yes. I think I can speak to this. For the record, early summer, director of communications for DOC. I think in part the 200,000 might have been a messaging issue from our end. Obviously, it doesn't fund seven positions. That's essentially what's needed to make the program whole. So right now we have five position numbers. That was what was allocated in FY twenty five when the program was put into statute. Two of those are filled, three of them are vacant. We need seven additional position numbers in order to staff up the program fully. And that 200,000 essentially will be the remaining funding that we need to get all of those positions. But each position costs around $100,000 a year. So I think we just might have not communicated that as clearly as we could have.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And do you
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: know would those be limited service positions for a certain time frame or just ongoing cost in perpetuity?
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: Yeah, it's a good question. When the statute was passed, the intent was that the program would be in perpetuity. So those would not be limited service, which is why the six sixty and I think the six fifty as well are both base funding that rolls over each year and continue funding those.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what would be the base? Is it six fifty or is it the 1,300,000.0?
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: I believe it's the 1.3. So we need the additional 200,000 to fully fund the program's entire team.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You still have some left of the original 1.3.
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: Yes. I can't speak to the process of like, I imagine that it's similar to when there is a position that exists and it's vacant and it gets rolled over into vacancy savings. But I think Marlene could better speak to that process.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So then the question that's rolling around out there is, do we use some of that money that was for pretrial supervision? Because if we're redesigning the pretrial supervision and we're scrapping the original thought of it and redefining it. And if the redefinition of it is that we have those supervisory, supervising officers working directly in the accountability docket that one day a week, and they're working to set up the wraparound services for the person who's out on conditions of release. Do they need the pretrial supervision on top of that? Or is that PMP person only gonna be working as the hub to coordinate the wraparound services? That's what we can figure out.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: I think a component of figuring that out is recognizing that the accountability docket as currently designed is not meant to last. It is meant to get through a pronounced backlog that stems from a myriad of factors, the most obvious of them being the pandemic, and then eventually accomplish its task by moving through that back wall, at which point an accountability docket just becomes the way court has functioned. District Manager, Godleski, in a conversation that I had around her experience with the court characterized it really as an impressive and an effective model that really was just a return to the way things had been done in earlier memories of her career, that the notion of letting somebody go multiple months on a charge was just not something that happened. And so moving to a faster period of resolution, swifter action was actually a return to older ways. My understanding of the docket is that its impact is diminishing backlogs. And then once those backlogs are done, you don't need the same kind of court every single, certainly not every single day, but questionably whether or not, really these individuals should be in the regular functioning of the court as opposed to a specific court just because of their, you would hope that you would get to the point where nobody has five accumulated dockets for minor crimes because you've successfully made through the backlog, and then you don't need, there is no accountability for it unless we significantly change the definition to be one docket for a person who once had five dockets two or three years ago, but now just has a new one. And I don't think that that's really what it's meant to do. So insofar as figuring out, for example, what pretrial as a statutory change from a couple years ago and something that was envisioned as a new tool, both for the court to use and for DOC to use as a component of the accountability court, I don't think that they're the same thing because one predates and has an actual function outside of the other, and that being pretrial predates and has a function outside of the accountability court.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I We gotta figure out house judiciary. They're seeing that accountability docket as getting the court back to where they were pre COVID, if it's only to take care of the backlog. Because I'm not sure that's their interpretation, and I wanna make sure.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: That's fair. I don't wish to speak for the court by any means.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Or
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: for the house judiciary committee. I think they may be thinking the accountability doc is ongoing. But we need to clarify that because I don't know where they are.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: That's what the judge said the other day.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: He said one day a week type thing instead of vision.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: I don't
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: know what it really would look like.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No, but would it be just to take care of the backlog, or is it gonna be ongoing regardless of the backlog? I think we need to clarify that with House Judiciary Committee in terms of when everybody says expand the accountability docket one day a week, it's pretty vague. I think we need more specifics to know where this pretrial supervision law plays in. So I'm not sure it plays in very well with any.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Yeah, exactly.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And everybody's kind of in agreement between this committee and judiciary to scrap it, but not totally scrap it. You gotta structure it in a way that's gonna work with whatever structure is with the court. We need some conversations with house judiciary.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: DOC doesn't wanna scrap the pretrial supervision. It has not been as voluminous as perhaps was anticipated. But for those for whom it has worked, it has worked. And again, component of the efficacy of the 3B courtroom was the fact that there is a potential for consequence. That consequence in seventy seven percent of the cases ended up being something through DOC. And this is a tool for expanding what DOC can offer. I believe that it's important.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Is this more important than work I'll throw that because I know where they're coming down the hall, they wanna put work crew back in place. I keep saying, well, there's a real cost to DOC, but their focus is not DOC, it's to provide another tool for the prosecution to place someone in a work room. And I said, well, that's putting pressure on DOC.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: And they said, well, that's not where we're looking at. One is far, far more costly than the other with regard to the volume of people going through it.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, we don't have much volume.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It's far more costly than pretrial, even though both have very low volumes.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Very, very low.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: Work crew doesn't work without higher volumes, whereas pretrial can for the individuals who are assigned to it.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, the work crew issue is coming your way. It's coming our way.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: We're cognizant of that. I feel confident that we can explain what DOC's position on it is, and it's one that's driven by data and by fact on the ground. But I'm certainly not prepared to talk about it in any granularity today. With regard to pretrial, I do feel that it's effective. It is not as voluminous as it was perhaps anticipated than it might be when it was first conceived two years ago. We saw that in Newport, but we did see people use it in Newport without an accountability court. It's a small number, but it was. And it was effective in that it kept some people out of a facility and instead in the community with a higher level of supervision. And that is ultimately certainly the state's goal. As counsel said just before I did, everything in Vermont says, let's not incarcerate people. That is the general direction, particularly in a pretrial situation. And the handful of cases, six to eight cases that were documented in Newport during its pilot phase were instances in which the person otherwise would have been remanded.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Well, I'm going to do what you say not to do, and I'm going to try to do a quick and dirty math in public. Maybe you'll be the helpful commissioner. I don't know. So I think you said seventy nine people went through the accountability docket, call it 80. And I think approximately a quarter ended up incarcerated with seventy five percent under DOC.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: Twenty two, twenty seven percent of the total and thirty six percent of the people who ended up in DOC custody. Yeah.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: So out of those eighty, about twenty ended up inside, and about forty ended up under some form of outside supervision. That is correct. One, so if we're not then doing a five day a week accountability docket, if we're doing, say, one day a week like people are talking about, And if we get all these resources in pretrial supervision, each of whom can supposedly do up to 20 cases, is there any realistic world in which we're going to hit that capacity? Use those resources. Right? Because each FTE times 20 people that they can supervise, do we get there?
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: We certainly didn't see that in Burlington. But we also did not say that because this position is nominally the pretrial position, that's all it can do.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It would be a bad management decision to say that we hired you for pretrial, you are only, there's only three people in pretrial, and that is all you can do.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: Yep.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: Not when other officers in any given P and P office have caseloads that are a good deal higher. So really to that extent, there may be somebody who's designated this, and we do the same with other kinds of P and P specialists. P and P officer may be a specialist in juvenile cases or a specialist in sex offender cases, but that may not be all that that P and P officer does if that specialized caseload is too low. Happily, P and P office you know, Smithtown, Vermont, which doesn't exist, is a designated sex offender PPO, but there's only three sex offenders in that town. And we're grateful for that. We're glad for that. But that doesn't mean that that person only has a 3% caseload. We figure out other things to do. And the same would be true of a pretrial. Pretrial is a component of your caseload, and should it explode and suddenly go quite high, then perhaps that's all you do. But in all likelihood, no, you would be doing other kinds of work as well. And please correct me. Deputy Director Marvel's here who knows much more about all these things than I. So interrupt and correct if I am wrong.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Yeah. I'll just get it, Barbara, to Direct and Field Services. Yeah. Like I was saying earlier, so it's here. You you really want flexibility, maximum flexibility. I mean, of the one of the issues that have with the current iteration, I think the current wrap, is we don't control the inflow. So if you give us 10 positions or one position, there could be one person assigned to free trial, it would be 100. It would be inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars for us to have one physician or 10 physicians that isn't being utilized for the full extent. So if you happen to get a maximum case to order to get a county, then we'll use it for that purpose. But we'd have to assign other duties to justify the use of funds.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the governor has proposed seven additional permanent positions for the pretrial supervision that would be used to work with the expansion of the accountability docket. How would you use those seven new positions if there's nobody under free trial supervision? It's very small.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It works out to one per P and P office is the number that we currently have plus the seven makes it 12. And furthermore, we would use them in ways that, again, the number of people that went through the 3B Courtroom and ended up on the caseload of Burlington PNP was 40, was 39. 39 folks are now under BUPP's caseload. Some percentage of the 22 that went to facilities probably won't be in those facilities for the duration, and so they will ultimately become part of BUPP's caseload in all likelihood. And so this process resulted in an increase to BUPP's caseload that really exceeds what we would normally say for a single person.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So those seven positions are really to increase your staffing at our field offices, regardless if that's pretrial supervision or an accountability court in the end.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It depends on whether or not it is It depends on the volume that we see of pretrial in any given location. And it also depends on where or if the accountability court is replicated in other locations. That person, it would be a logical decision to say this individual who is designated as pretrial is also our routine representative in the accountability court.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But if the accountability docket's only for a short period of time to take care of the backlog- Yep. You've increased your staffing across the field. That's really what you've done.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: I could add in that what usually afford, if the intent was to use it for the court is we do what we've had in Burlington forever, which we don't have many in our office, is having a court liaison. Really what they do is analogous to accountability court just at a slower pace, probably not at a comfortable volume over time. That's having someone there to answer questions like what kind of services would you recommend to them? If they get a two serve sentence, would they have to do incarcerated programming? I'm sorry, fraud.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Take your time. Just don't give it to us. Let me go to Conor and then you go.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: Sure. I guess I'm having trouble getting to a point where I support this. I'm just going to ramble a little bit and maybe you can help me with these things wrapping around in my head, right? In a way, I can't divorce the money from what's going on with the ongoing costs here. And like 1.3 feels like too little to do a lot of this right, and also too much to sort of okay with the question marks. And the question marks, I don't know are. How many people does this impact? Where is it gonna be? I feel like I need more tangible info there. What I do know, though, is if I talk to any state's attorney, any public defender, I'm on judicial retention, I'm talking to a lot of junkets. And all of them are saying, we're drowning. Our caseloads are out of control. And I'm just wondering, it feels like we starve the programs we have in existence right now. Like, state's attorney was asking for a bunch of positions that we didn't give them. And if the goal is to reduce the backlog, shouldn't we just fund the things we have and do it right rather than look at another program that has so many question marks? Just sort of I think we do. We starve too many programs in state government. And I don't doubt the intentions on this. And I don't doubt the results of the accountability court. But it sounded like you hear Defender General, a lot of resources were pumped into there for a four month period that might not be sustainable. We don't have lawyers. We don't have space in Washington County. We don't have enough courtrooms to do this. So, just feels so vague. And could that money be better used just bolstering what we have? You guys included. You're all overworked as well.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Mean, that's a quandary. I'm feeling the same way. I don't know what direction to take.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: I could speak. The original concept for the positions, I think, was that we're going to roll out statewide. You brought that statewide. Trial. That was the idea behind having basically one person in the job. We were looking at the eligibility criteria we had, the original version. We were looking at about a thousand people give or take that could have been put on free trial. But again, don't put any inflow. So we were just predicting maximum amount. But we assumed at the time that the need was such that we would get that maximum.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But when was that done? That was done a couple of years ago? Yeah, the first iteration
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: of the It
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: hasn't played out that way.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: It hasn't been allowed to yet.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And maybe that's because of the roadblock to get there and that you needed five or more?
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Part is you need the positions in place before you start taking the deferrals. So there's upfront investment covenants that need to happen if you want to do pretrial. And like I said last time, we're operating from a novel plan of nine. We've had nine people on pre trial between two areas. One where it's competing with accountability court and like last time I said it was kind of comparing our bypass surgery to cholesterol management. That the accountability court, that was the bypass surgery. You needed to address the issue of surgery at the time, on a number of gene cases.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Then we get back to, is the accountability docket just gonna be used to clear up the backlog or is it going to be incorporated within the day to day functions of the judiciary where the accountability docket is gonna be there going forward regardless about taking care of the backlog caused by COVID. And it will be one day a week in the courts. If that model is successful, the accountability docket model is as successful as it was in the Chittenden County pilot, then why do
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: we need pretrial supervision? I would offer that we can provide consistent service based on directive and training throughout the state. No other court could do that because they have different demographics. Really, when you're looking at Burlington, you're talking about a saturation of services that are location dependent. We're not location dependent. We can provide free trial the way we provide it at Burlington, at least in terms of our supervision time and the strategies we used
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: to because we have one person. You had one person
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: because the system with the accountability docket was working so that you didn't have to have folks under supervision. So that's what we're trying to balance. If we extend the accountability docket to other places in Vermont, is it ongoing or is it just to take care of the backlog? That's the first question we have to figure out with our colleagues and as judiciary, what's their interpretation? Haven't, I've kind of understood it it's ongoing because they really thought it was successful. If that's the direction that the legislature is going in, then you really have to look at the pretrial supervision program based on the pilot project in Chittenden County because the accountability docket was pretty successful and people didn't need that supervision.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: It depends on the terms of what accountability docket means, and this is beyond DOC's control. But I will say that insofar as Burlington is concerned, where it happened and where we have experience with it and not therefore, venturing an idea of where it might go or where it could go, or if it will go anywhere, staying completely away from that. In Burlington, sooner or later, you would run out of people who fit the needs of the accountability docket as it was initially defined. Nobody should have five dockets. That should be a really extreme and unusual situation, not literally hundreds of people with five or more dockets. And at some point, the court would make it through that. And it would make it through that whether we're doing five days a week. If five days a week was necessary to make that first really incredible, and prosecutor Waite deserves so much credit for this, as does Judge Mailey and all of the participants in it. But to get through that first just tremendous load of folks, more than 700 dockets among fewer than 100 people is really kind of crazy. And you get through most of it, and then you say, well, there's still some people with five dockets, we can slow down a little bit now, but sooner or later that should go away as well. And at that point, you are left with a system as it functioned before we had a situation in which you had some really large number of people with this unconscionable number of accumulated dockets. So that's my understanding of where Burlington was headed. I cannot speak for the ideas about how to do the accountability docket.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah, either. This may not be five pending dockets.
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: May be If you change the terms, yes.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And that's a conversation we need to have with our colleagues. Kevin?
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: My impression from the testimony that seemed like everybody saying wavelength was, the reason the accountability docket worked was because all the resources that would be necessary to solve the problem got together and solve the problem rather than in parallel, if you will, instead of a series of events that takes forever. And so I think my impression of this committee was, okay, where we don't have all of those resources in every of the seven different counties or seven different
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: judicial systems like we
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: do in Burlington, if we did one day a week there and concentrated the resources that we could get that parallel effect like we got in Burlington that reduced the backlogs. So it's almost a merger of the two, the pretrial and the and the docket Mhmm. So that we get that parallel activity going on rather than going in series. Does that make any sense, or is that just the way my screwy mind is working?
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: I understand what you're describing. Again, I don't wanna sort of presuppose how it works in other places because that's not my purview. There's the court that will need to determine that and the prosecutor's offices. But what you're describing is true, but it wasn't just that all the services were there. It was that all the services were there and able to act rapidly. What it really is, is it's the rapidity of resolution and then consequence as a form from that resolution.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: What
[Nicholas J. Deml, Commissioner of Corrections]: pretrial is, is pretrial is something that allows you to maintain a sense of that rapidity, even though you're actually kind of backing off. Like, you don't need to have the resolution today because you've got pretrial in the meantime. So we can push the resolution a little bit, not too long, because that's what got us in trouble in the first place was these long, long, as a police officer, when you are issuing a citation to somebody for six months out, that is not an effective addressing of that person's low level criminogenic behavior. So the notion of being able to do it quickly is what's key, but pretrial does allow you to say, well, I don't have to make a rushed decision in this moment. I can push a little bit farther and still know that the individual is going to have the same sense of being watched and having accountability and having services, because the pretrial process also connects people with services while they're awaiting resolution and consequence.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Brian, and I'm gonna have to vote shortly, and I wanna make sure that Ken from the state's attorneys has a chance to testify as well. Brian?
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: It's a knock on to Kevin's. It feels almost like these officers are supposed to be doing two things. One is, oh my gosh, let's help you limp along and we'll get you to your trial date. The other is we're going to get you to whatever services are available. But we've just heard from Gary Marvel that if you go and we all heard this that if you get outside of whatever area, those services aren't available. And so there is a point at which I ask, is it not better to be it's a limited amount of money. I don't know how much you can buy. But are we not better trying to provide those services as opposed to the supervision that's supposed to be connecting them with them if they don't exist?
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Just to clarify.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah. I think It's not that they're
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: not available. It's that they're they're the landscape's different. And you're gonna need an expert who knows the local resources, but you don't wanna apply them to the That's what we can provide. You know? So I think to the commission's point, you don't want five dockets to happen. Like you never want that to get to that point in a pretrial officer. Part of what they could do is stabilize individuals. I mean, I think what you're seeing here, but it's just a unique circumstance. It's actually a historical, historically unique circumstance. We don't ever want to get there. So however that's resolved, sorry, it's resolved by that. Mean, goal would be to prevent that from building up elsewhere. We had an officer that can work with people using those pretrial services as they fall over or exist in other areas. Maybe part of that's advocating for different programming or different interventions in a given area.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So by saying that you're really separating, that's the policy decision that we're going to have to make. You totally separate this pretrial supervision program from the accountability docket. They're not connected in any way.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Will they work? Know.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Some people want to replicate that model statewide, But I'm just thinking of what's been testified here over the last hour and a half, that the pretrial supervision program is kind of its own standalone and it's not connected really to the accountability docket. Because if you're really doing the accountability docket properly, then you're not gonna need much pretrial supervision.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Or vice versa.
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Or vice versa. If you're doing the pretrial supervision well, then it's not going to if the accountability docket is structured like the pilot project, we need five or more pending dock dockets, which I don't know what judiciary is thinking. Do these two proposals work in tandem or are they totally separate of each other? And I think we need some more conversations with house judiciary to see what they're really thinking. Because maybe they haven't thought of it quite in that lens through that lens yet. I don't know. We need more conversation with legislators with our companies. I'm gonna move this along, put you out of the hot seat. I'll be glad. I have to go downstairs to Senate Transportation to talk about the parole not parole, whatever it is, the driver's license thing. So, Kim, can you just give the state's attorneys? It's a driver's license, 549, I think.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: Produce yourself for the record and
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: take it from me.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: All right. For the record, my name is Kim McManus. I'm with the Department of State's Attorneys and Chairs. As you can imagine, we do not have a department wide unanimous opinion on free trial supervision. But to testify in house judiciary on a few matters. And I believe that's why chairmans wanted me to come in and repeat a few things that were said just a few doors down. First thing I want to mention, the accountability docket, we have said, and this was said at the joint hearing, we don't think it's going to be an easy cut and paste from what was done in Chittenden. Each county is going to be a little bit different in what it needs. As the commissioner was stating, it might need an initial five days to get things running. But what we saw in Chittenden is that five days quickly went to two to three days, depending on how the cases were evolving. And that now, State Attorney George believes she can keep it going on a one day a week process because they've gotten to that point. They triaged the big numbers. And with the hope that as she's rolling through those five or more, as the numbers come down, she can start looking at three or more, not letting it get to five or more. But I think what's really important for folks to realize is, yes, there's a backlog we need to get through. But even when we deal with the backlog, we still have this competition between these misdemeanor cases and our violent felony cases. And we've had an increase in violent felonies across the state. And if that continues to either remain or increase, we're going to constantly have this tension. Even when we clear up the backlog, it's going to slowly build up. When you have a trial three trial dates that month, you're not going to be able even though you want this five or more person to come in, if those are all misdemeanor cases, you're going to put the violent felony on for trial that's ready to go. So yes, there's a backlog issue, but that's not all of it. The other piece around the accountability docket to keep in mind is that the individuals who are accumulating these cases and who are struggling to either follow-up on a pretrial service referral or to get to court on time, they need this scaffolding around them. They're not like anyone in this room. If you happen to be involved in a crime and to be cited into court, you're going to have that on your eight calendar circle highlighted. You're going to have reminders set up. There's a subset of the population that does not have that executive functioning. And those are the folks that we're seeing in that docket. So I just wanted to say a few things on that to keep in mind. For pretrial supervision, one of the issues I raised in house judiciary is, yes, when this was created two years ago, I believe the legislature was looking at this five or more population that had these multiple misdemeanors. But you can also be looking at the other end of who might benefit from pretrial supervision. And that's what the commissioner was speaking to, folks who would otherwise be detained. When I was a prosecutor in Addison County, I had the domestic violence docket or caseload. I had so many defendants who, for concerns about their violence in the future, I was asking to be held in jail pending their trial. And I would make that argument over and over again. And then the judge often would try to craft the most complicated conditions of release so that the person did not have to be held. And while I often didn't agree with that decision in many cases, I appreciated that the judge's role is to have the least restrictive conditions of release. So these really complicated curfew hours, responsible adult that the person had to check-in with, driving to and from work and only driving on this road, it would get that specific in the conditions of release. Nobody was checking on that. We had to be reactive. I was lucky. I had a deputy sheriff who was on a federal grant who I could use for ten hours a week. I was able to ask my deputy to go check on someone who had a twenty four hour curfew. That was a gift. Feel like that was special. That was not consistent around the state. So if pretrial supervision, the way some of the changes have been made, taking out the five zero one docket, taking out the need for the violation of condition or release. If you leave it to the parties in the court to decide, is this someone who pretrial supervision could benefit from? Is this someone who if there is a supervising officer who's going to check-in on them, physically check their home to see if they're following their curfew or whatever other conditions, we do see a huge benefit there. I mean, that would make many people feel much safer knowing if you are going to be out on conditions of release, somebody's supervising that. So I would encourage you all to, as you think about this, there is that other end of folks. And again, that sounds like who was on it in Orleans. And as we talked about, I think, a few weeks ago, that's who would agree to this. If you're working it out between the defense and prosecution and presenting it to the court, a defendant's not going to agree to this extra supervision unless it's less than possibly being detained.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: Shawn, I have a question.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Okay, so just trying to figure this all out. So what you're promoting then is that these seven people who would go out into these spaces around Vermont would have more of an eye on those people than you had?
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: That would be what I would see as pretrial supervision, like actually supervising.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: So because they would be the people who would go check on a twenty four hour curfew, or they might go and see if they were driving the right road or whatever. Okay, so that would be their job, would be to get out there and, okay, thanks. That's helpful. In addition to understanding what services are out there so that they can advise the person who needs to Correct, but not all of it. Right, okay. Thank you, Ken.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: So just because we do have extremely limited time and multiple of us have meetings, let's try to, unless it's really important, hold it so Kim can get through all of our Sorry.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: No, that's quite all right. And again, I think if the language has changed and there is that expansion of who would be able to come in, I couldn't say for sure, but I would think we would see an increase in the numbers. But to your point, not just the supervision, but yes, what does this person need to be successful in supervision? That's where the services tie in. I had one other point.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: We all.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Let me just say that. Anyway, Happy to answer any other questions. Oh, I have my point. It came back. There we go. Oh, you're good. Thank goodness. I do think, and it sounds like the Department of Corrections is seeing it this way, If these pretrial supervision officers are also that's their primary caseload are these individuals on pretrial supervision. If they have the flexibility that they are the officer who's assigned an accountability docket going forward, that makes perfect sense. As long as whatever's written doesn't silo them off, I think there is a natural overlap. They're not the same, but there is an overlap. So if they can use those individuals in both settings, that's gonna make a lot of sense.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Is that the whole point? That's okay.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: So I do have a question. Do you have one? No, go ahead.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: So, I mean, we struggle with this not necessarily I mean, I don't think for any some people's philosophical, other people's not. But logistically, it's not something that's been successful. Do you have ideas whether you can articulate them today or if you can get them to us later, ways you would advise if you were writing this, how you would make it more, let's say, attractive to prosecutors and more importantly, I guess, to defense attorneys since we've heard that they're kind of, why would my client agree to this when they could have nothing? And so I'm sure this is circling your head somewhere. You're like, well, one person using it is not an effective program. Even if it's five, it's really not that effective to see it. I know it's vague and silly.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: No, no, no. I think there's two things. I think to be fair to the program, it's really only functioned for about a year and where are we in the month, two months or so, like the year 2025. So to be fair to that. So even though they've had a small number, I don't know if it's enough time, honestly, to see whether or not it's been successful. The tricky part about what could be written in, it's really knowing the strength of the program. More prosecutors would argue for pretrial supervision if we knew it was this if we're talking about the but for detaining someone, I would want to know, yes, they're on an electronic monitor and that's being monitored. What does that mean? What's their response time? How often are they doing checks? What is the monitoring that's happening? That's what the victims would ask me. Why would I want them out? Oh, they're on pretrial supervision. What does that mean? How robust is it? And I think one of the tensions right now was the report from the Council for State Government said, currently, it's not robust enough to provide that supervision. Someone who I would want detained and I would put on pretrial supervision, if they're getting phone check ins once a month, that's not doing anything. If they're having once a week meetings, I'm still probably not thrilled about that from prosecutors if it's a safety issue. So I think that question of if we're using it for that end of the spectrum, how robust is it? If it is a caseload of 20 or so, how often are they checking in? How are they enforcing the conditions? That's what I would want to know. I don't think anything would need to change in how it's written other than taking out the current
[Rep. Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: restrictions.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Right, right. Shawn, was there a person We had a person who was doing pre trial supervision somewhere, right? And we had a Have we spoken to that person?
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: There
[Director of Communications, VT DOC (name not stated)]: are two pretrial supervision officers currently hired. One is based out of Burlington, one is based in Newport. They have not been asked to testify in front of this committee, but we can certainly arrange for it.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: Like the Burlington person, it just seems reasonable that it would be great to talk to that person just ask them, okay, you were in the trenches. How was it? How'd it go? What do you think? Anyway, I just, that's my question.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: It would make sense. And again, what is the pushback from attendance? Again, why would they want to do it?
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: Honor, it is an unfair question, Kevin. Given what we know about this program at the moment, is it ready for prime time?
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: I think that's the tricky thing that Gary Marble was saying. Until the person's there and functioning and we're sending people to it, how do we know? So I sort of have to put the person You had
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: a million and a half ongoing to reduce the court backlog. Is that what you'd spend the money on?
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Meaning a million and a half to
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: You got a million and a half dollars on the That's
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: my department, right? Got it. If I had to divide the pie, I would put more money towards the rapid response to those misdemeanor cases.
[Rep. Conor Casey, Member]: But
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: if there could be a world where a slice of that money went towards because from my perspective, from my caseload, I had a number of people out on conditions of release who I didn't sleep well at night. My victims did not I did not think they should be in the public. But knowing that we don't want to detain people pre trial, if there was robust supervision provided, I definitely would have sought. So if some of that Kai could go to that. Yes. I want those.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Thanks. Yeah. Sure. So the first part
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: will take ten seconds. It's a comment on what Sweeney was saying, which is if that person or one of those two people were to testify, I'd love to hear how they operated as utility infielders, as Gary Marble was suggesting. So not just what was your experience within the system, what else are you up to? And then the question for you, I think I understand that some of the problem here is there's no incentive for those who would be under supervision to be under supervision. And I don't know if you're the right person to ask whether this passes constitutional muster. But if the choice is either you're incarcerated or you're under supervision, is that a choice that can be put to them?
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Well, so the way and by choice, maybe that's not the right way. So say we're at arraignment.
[Barbara [last name not stated], Director of Field Services, VT DOC]: Yes.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Representative Sweeney, sorry, you're the defendant. You have an excellent attorney, though. Well done, representative Winters. I'm arguing to hold Representative Sweeney, held without bail.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yes.
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Horrible crime. Life offense, so sorry. His attorney is going to say, woah, woah, woah, we don't need that. We could do pretrial supervision. At that point, that is now a very nice option. Or he may argue, no, no, no, we can do a twenty four hour curfew and his uncle Joe will be his responsible adult. And the court, at that point, with those two arguments, will be like, I don't feel great about old without. I don't feel great with just a twenty four hour curfew, pretrial supervision. That's where again, that would be least restrictive if the court found it to be.
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah. Okay. Okay, thank you.
[Rep. Shawn Sweeney, Clerk]: And that brings me back to line 21 on page one, is it's the risk of the extended either not appearing or leaving or endangering the public, but the prosecuting attorney is saying, I don't want that risk to be put on public,
[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: so they need to be held. Or And so, yes. So any of those three possibilities, we have a concern for public safety. So maybe it's you have a DUI. So I'm not concerned that you're going to go around punching people. I don't need to hold you, but I need you not to drink or drive. That's how I'm going to take care of public safety. So I'm going to ask for a restriction for you not to drive or drink. I don't need to hold you. But as the concern for public safety goes up, the number of conditions goes up. And that's where I may, right at the pinnacle, say, I need to hold this person.
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: And so we're going to obviously continue talking about this. The good news for everybody, including Kim is that we're not going to talk about it anymore right
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: now, because
[Rep. James Gregoire, Vice Chair]: we do have, unfortunately, meetings at twelve and multiple. So Kim, thank you for coming. Obviously, we're gonna be back in touch with you. We really appreciate your
[Rep. Brian Minier, Member]: testimony.