Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: The House and Senate Judiciary Committees this Wednesday morning, February 11. And today we're going to take up generally public safety, but really focusing on the Chittenden County pilot, also known as the accountability court, the 3B docket, and other names, I'm sure. And really just want to understand how we're doing generally in the criminal justice system as far as having swift and certain consequences, but focusing on the pilot project. So we'll turn it over to state's attorneys and deputy state's attorneys to proceed. So thank you for being here.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Thank you so much for having us. For the record, my name is Kate McManus with the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs. I am joined today with Special Prosecutor Zach Whate, who's also Deputy State's Attorney from Washington County, and State's Attorney Sarah George from Chittenden County. We are going to provide just a deep dive in what has been going on in what we'll call, we're having the same name today, the accountability docket in Chittenden County. I am going to run through a how did we get here in the fall, like sort of what was the pinch point that brought us here, who were the folks involved in pulling this all together, going from idea to then handing it over to Zach to talk about implementation of the program, and then Sarah talking about the impact on her office and what was needed from her office, if that works for everyone? All right. Wonderful. Some of the numbers you are going to see once I get this working place, sorry. I've seen a lot of these numbers before. Let's see. You don't see them yet. So hold

[Kim (committee staff/AV support)]: on one moment.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: See them soon.

[Speaker 0]: Technology.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: It's just a dramatic pause. We're so close.

[Speaker 0]: Oh, there we go.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Some samples. Okay. Incredible. Alright.

[Speaker 0]: Not quite there yet on this topic.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Start it again. We're really building up the tension on

[Kim (committee staff/AV support)]: the map.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, this is very dramatic. There we go.

[Kim (committee staff/AV support)]: All right.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: So again, all of the slides you're about to see have been presented to your committees at the beginning of the year. This is the snapshot data that our department pulls together. This poll was done the December, analyzed during the December. So these are the numbers as of December 5. You are well aware that we have had a backlog, a logjam, in our court system of pending cases. We have made great strides in moving these cases. As you will see, there's been, since December 23 to December 25, a 14.5% decrease in pending dockets. But our numbers are still too high and straining our judicial system. Part of this strain and these are just the criminal case numbers, so 19,000 cases currently. As you've heard many times, part of this strain is that we've had an increase in our serious felony cases, particularly our homicides, while still having repeat offenders on our misdemeanor end. And these are all in the same stream, all in the same docket, courtroom space. And though our repeat offenders, we keep wanting to get to those cases. Our serious felonies often will take place, time, trial time, court time from those cases. Just a reminder on some of the numbers. Again, you'll have all these. So the multiple docket individuals, this is something we've been tracking for a number of years. And what we have found is that folks with three or more pending dockets take up 43% of our caseload. Folks with five or more dockets take up 26% of our caseload. And what's really important to understand with that five or more is that by the person, it is only 6% of those involved in the criminal justice system are taking up a quarter of our time and space. Good morning. Good morning. Executive Director Rutgers Duvont, Betsy, is the legislative attorney, has been advocating in the state of the last few years the need to separate and focus on these repeat offenders. Often, are misdemeanor cases. They're not always exclusively misdemeanor cases, but the majority tend to be multiple misdemeanors. And we've advocated that we need to pull them out and give a time and space where we just focus on these cases. This past fall, Governor Scott convened a group of stakeholders to support Chittenden County, which had reached a boiling point amongst community members, business leaders, the prosecutors, law enforcement, wondering what could be done to help support Chittenden County. And the mayor of Burlington requested help from the state. Governor Scott responded by convening stakeholders within the criminal justice system and within the community to respond. And one of the responses was pulling out this idea of a dedicated docket. The governor's office coordinated with our state's attorney's office with our executive director, and the idea came up that we could pull one of our deputy state's attorneys and assign that deputy state's attorney to be a special prosecutor for the governor's office. And we were very lucky that state's attorney from Washington County, Michelle Donnelly, very generously loaned, so to speak, her deputy state's attorney for this project. Then we had state's attorney Sarah George agree to host the project within her department, which requires a considerable amount of administrative support and just logistical support. And State's Attorney George can speak to that in a little bit. The governor also had pulled in the Agency of Human Services, which you will hear from them later. And prosecutor Waite will speak to the importance of having us providers in the room, in the courtroom, as well as Department of Corrections in the courtroom to be able to provide this wraparound experience for these individuals with the five or more dockets. Critical to all of this was we needed the space and time to be running a courtroom five days a week just on these cases. The judiciary was able to find the courtroom and find a judge, which meant pulling a judge out of retirement for this special project. And of course, we needed the defender general to be involved. The defender general assigned a primary public defender. I believe there were other defense attorneys, depending on the case, who had to also be slotted into this schedule. But all of the players had to come in and had to agree to this idea, which took a tremendous amount of time and effort in the fall. But we were able to get this idea pushed through, and then we had Zach Whate take charge and lead the project. So those are the big picture of where we were, who was involved. And then now Zach is going to talk about implementing the program. And then again, state's attorney Sarah George is here to talk about impact and then other questions you might have of how we move forward from here.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Thank you. So I was appointed by the governor as special prosecutor on 10/16/2025, and day one of the Chittenden County Accountability Court was 10/20/2025. At that point, that morning, we had a meeting with Judge Martin Mailey, Judge Pact, who is the presiding judge in Chittenden County, some defense attorneys, court staff, and myself about essentially who's our population and how do we do this. The first, I would say, two to four weeks was really about identifying the population of individuals who had five or more, and then it was about what are the resources that we need, and then what we discovered while pulling all this together was the barriers to communication. To start off with the population, we knew going in it was going to be people with five or more dockets. The judiciary through Judge Zone, Judge Malay, and the court in Chittenden County gave us a list, a very long list of every defendant who had pending five or more dockets. I took that list and was able to whittle it down because some of them were inactive, some of them had been dismissed but not fully in the database yet, some were in treatment court. We whittled it down to about eight seventy eight dockets and roughly about 103 people, and that includes people who were active pending with defense attorneys and who were on warrant status at that point. Once we identified the universe of individuals we were dealing with, we knew just through doing the work that these people tend to struggle with substance use, mental health, and typically housing instability related issues. A lot of those issues are the driver for the crimes and the offenses that they're committing. The question was, we have the population, how do we make this so it's not just regular court where the attorneys do everything in front of a judge? Well, we needed people in the courtroom from providers, clinicians, case managers, and so working with the governor's office, and my contact at the governor's office was a weekly meeting with Sarah and Tim and Jay Johnson, was about this process. What do we need? How are things going? Any hiccups? One of the topics we were talking about early on were the resources. We knew Burlington had Howard Center, Chittenden County had Howard Center, so that was good. They already had an office in the court and engaged with the treatment court process, so they were able to be brought in. We had the Agency of Human Services, a bunch of team members there, I know some you'll speak with later, were also involved. They were brought in, and then also from AHS was DOC, who's a big partner in this as well. Once we had that, what we realized, okay, we have the people, we have the resources, we had struggles with the ability to communicate with each other because what Sarah and I do is everything we do is public. We publicly file documents into court, the person comes in and publicly has an attorney and their charges and allegations are discussed, but what the service providers do is protected by a bunch of state and federal regulations, policies and law. Got together, we put our minds together, and we had our different agencies and their different lawyers come up with a one universal release that a defendant involved in the accountability court could sign, and then all of us all of a sudden could talk about it. It wasn't just me going, I've charged John Smith, Howard Senner, do you know John Smith? And then going, they haven't signed a release, I can't say anything. Now we could have a free conversation. That really hit the ground around the November, so we were approximately three weeks into this when really the plane, if you will we were already flying, but the plane was really coming together, and at that point, we were able to have weekly meetings, which we called the care team meetings, with myself, Sarah, some defense attorneys, the service providers, DOC, and talk about these defendants proactively as opposed to just waiting for the court hearing or five minutes before the court hearing and having a conversation with the defense attorney, we could identify, hey, over the next three to four weeks, these are the people coming in, these are the issues. Do you have housing? Power centered? Can you get them on a substance use assessment? What can you offer? Sometimes it was assessments, sometimes it was just case management, and sometimes it was a whole holistic approach for the specific individual depending on their level of engagement prior to the accountability court coming to existence. The entire time this was going on in meetings and behind the scenes, we were having court five days a week with Judge Malay, was the retired judge that sat as the presiding judge for our accountability court. Early on, what we found was we needed the five days a week in court, bring the people in, work out these communication issues and barriers between the service providers and the state and defense. Once we got into about mid to late December, we really just naturally started to do two to three days a week where we were pretty much all day court. We didn't really need necessarily five days a week because we had the universe going on, we had the open communication. It was helpful that we had that because people are arrested, people come in on new charges, and so the judge and I were always available, but it naturally progressed to this two to three times a week situation. The key, I think, for all of this is, I would say, three main components that really allowed us to be successful. The first is a dedicated judge and court time. In regular court, what Sarah and I deal with is the court docket and calendar is scheduled out two, three, four months, and so if you're looking for a hearing in thirty days, good luck, you're likely to get it in sixty, maybe ninety, or we're canceling something else to get that in, or we're just squeezing it in at like 08:30 before the calendar and hope it doesn't turn into a thirty or forty five minute hearing. Here, because we had such a limited population and we had a dedicated judge and dedicated prosecutor in our own courtroom, we were able to see these individuals weekly to multiple times a week. That is, I believe, really key part of also accountability isn't just prosecuting them for the conduct they engaged in, but in a way forcing them to repeatedly come before a judge who was engaged in these conversations, knew the cases, knew the underlying issues, and wanted to see the person do well as well. I think having to repeatedly come before a judge at least weekly, I think the latest we ever put anybody out was maybe ten days. Most of the time, these defendants in criminal court see the judge three to four times a year, so once every three to four months, and that's whether it's a serious case or retail theft or a DUI, and if the more serious case, sometimes it's less court time because you get into a scheduling order and motions and things of that nature, but the ability for the court working with the attorneys to be flexible and creative with the court's schedule was key in moving these cases forward and continuing to engage with these individuals. A lot of them live lives of hardship, and so telling them to come to court in sixty days runs into a lot of complications. Maybe not for us who do this as professionals and maybe not for those of us here in the room today, but a lot of these people with housing instability, substance and mental health issues, they're struggling to survive today and tomorrow, let alone focused on their court date in sixty or ninety days, so that court schedule flexibility was key. The other thing that was different than regular court was the service providers and AHS and DOC and Howard Center and other providers like Pathways being in the courtroom and ready to engage with both the attorneys, but mainly the defendants fairly quickly, whether it's before the court hearing. At times we've taken a break. Judge said, Well, we call you, go meet with the EHS provider, or after the court hearing. We called it in Chittenden County, I think it started to be called the warm handoff. Essentially, wanted to take the defendant from being in front of the judge at the table to literally introduce them to the service provider or case manager right there sitting in the back of the courtroom who's listening to all the issues with the court case and the litigation and the person's concerns. That is also key, because right now in regular criminal court, what happens is we have a court hearing, and whether it's the defense attorney, whether it's the state or the judge, typically the defendant is handed a piece of paper and said, go call go call Valley Vista, see if you can get in, and that is it. They are left to struggle through the maze of regulations and paperwork and health insurance, and all of that that as a lawyer, I struggle with as well, so I can't imagine the burden on them. Having that person there to be able to go out into a conference room, sit with them, realize that, for instance, their Medicaid had expired, get them signed up back on Medicaid, and then do the evaluation to see if Valley Vista, for instance, a residential rehab for substance or alcohol issues would take them. Doing that right then and there was key because the person engaged, and there was no delay in the court case. A lot of times we say, We'll see you in thirty days or sixty days. We we hope you come back with an answer about are you getting into treatment, and they haven't got an answer or they haven't been able to link up. Here, we did all that. We kind of front loaded all that. In addition, one of the service providers, as I looked at it, was the Department of Corrections. As Sarah knows, when we are dealing with just resolving a criminal case, typically DOC is out there in the periphery in terms of, well, this person's going to get sentenced to a DOC facility or supervision by DOC in the community, but they're not really involved in what does that mean for the defendant, the individual, what can that individual expect once their court case ends and they're now in the custody of DOC? We brought DOC in as a partner to say, hey, we have this treatment plan, for instance. This defendant has been held for two months. They have arrived to Valley Vista three days from now. They're going to change their plea. They're going to either go on furlough, which is a prison sentence but in the community, heightened level of supervision, or they're going to go on probation. Either way, DOC, do you agree that this person can be released from the facility, that their sister or their aunt or their partner can drive them to Valley Vista, and the parameters of the treatment plus the aftercare plan, is DOC on board with this? DOC was right there along the way going, Yeah, we agree, this is good. We want the person to engage in services, we want them to be rehabilitated. That gave the defendant confidence as opposed to just listening to their defense attorney saying, You're good, DOC's on board. That gave the defendant confidence to go, Wow, once I change my plea and go under supervision of DOC, they agree with the plan. We've negotiated up front as well. A lot of the times this doesn't happen in regular court. As prosecutors, we want the defendant to engage in services upfront. We want them to engage whether it's substance use, mental health treatment, counseling of some sort. Sometimes they do through help with their defense attorney and the defense doesn't tell us. Sometimes they do with the help of their defense attorney and the defense rings our bell and goes, Hey, they went to rehab. We don't need anything more than a conviction, but we have, as prosecutors, really limited to no power to get that person or influence to get that person to engage in treatment because typically that's reserved for post conviction. We sentence them to probation, we issue a condition of probation, that is you must engage in substance use treatment, and then DOC essentially takes over this division. Here we front loaded all that, and I think that was key to resolving cases, to hopefully potentially keeping these individuals out of the criminal court system, and to be frank, get these people the help that I think they needed and were struggling to get themselves, and we found that a lot of them wanted the help. Some of them throughout this process understood that that would require them to, whether it's on cash bail or to be held without bail, require them to sit for a few days to a few weeks while this plan was coming together. Another thing that DOC did as well is they front loaded a lot of the treatment in the facilities for our population, and so people that were held on cash bail or held without bail in a correctional facility were also being assessed by DOC and their partner Wellpath for mental health substance abuse. They were part of our release so we could openly communicate and say, hey, you know, they qualify for intensive inpatient rehab type of treatment, and then we could formulate if acceptable to everybody, we could formulate a treatment plan for that individual, say, to be released to go to Valley Vista. Ultimately, that led to broad based resolutions that were individualized per the individual. If we want to turn to the data here, we started on October 20 with about eight seventy eight dockets, and as you see in the total dockets at the bottom from 2.6 in bold there, we ended with nine seventy two dockets. Again, these are people who are on arrest warrant status and active in the community and active in the facility, meaning they're active in court, they're held in a correctional facility. That's total. We were able to resolve from 10/20/2025 to February 2002 of ultimately the nine seventy two dockets that we had in our universe, and the next slide is the docket progression just in an easier way to view how it went through this four month process. We reached a point in about mid, maybe early to mid January where the people, the individuals who were coming into our court were literally just hitting their fifth docket, and that's because we were able to, as I talked about, front load a lot of this work with the service providers, have these conversations, resolve some of them that had been hanging around for a while, or individuals that had twelve, fifteen, some of them had 27 dockets. We were able to deal with those people upfront, solve their cases, put them under sentence in a lot of cases. We hit the point where, and that's why I felt February 6 was a good time for me to go back to Washington County and pass this off to Sarah because as we were having our weekly conversations, we were getting to a point where literally the person was picking up their fifth docket and coming to me, but Sarah and her team had done all the work. We were kind of like, well, it makes more sense now for Sarah and her team to continue with this in their weekly accountability at court process. I think that shows that a lot of the backlog, if we're just looking at it's in numbers, was cleared and dealt with for people, for the individuals we dealt with, that means we linked them with services, got them more ingrained in their community, some of them are doing exceptionally well and have progressed substantially to the point where they are rock stars in their treatment facility, whether it's the 3.1 beds or in the out of state facilities that we utilized in New Hampshire. Again, lot of these people wanted to engage in treatment and support. There were some individuals that I think going in we thought of things are going to be reach out to thefts, maybe DLSs, negligent operations, kind of what we would classify as low level, still an impact, still has a victim, still bothersome and worrisome to the community, but low level compared to what Sarah was dealing with, which were murders. We had a lot of people with that. We also had a lot of people who had domestic assaults, aggravated assaults, assaults and robberies, and you could see the progression of their conduct from retail thefts, DUI with drugs, to assault and robberies. Instead of just stealing a pair of shoes from the store, they stole a pair of shoes and threatened to shoot the store owner. The progression of severity of their crimes, you could kind of map out on the timeline. Some of these people were held in the facility when I got there by Sarah's office. Some of them were on arrest warrant status and working with law enforcement. We put together a warrants list, and it was through the DMV, state police, the Department of Public Safety and local law enforcement Burlington and Chittenden County Sheriffs that they tracked some of these down, because we started I think with 25 or 26 people on warrant status and we're leaving with I think 19 on warrant status. Those are people that law enforcement themselves went out and looked for. And so we ended with if we want to go to the pie chart, the first

[Speaker 0]: pie chart there. You're not on the screen right now.

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Think part of it's the Internet right now.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Yeah. As Kim's pulling that up I think there was a little apprehension after the governor announced this plan. I think a lot of people thought he had a good idea. I certainly did. That's why I joined up and signed on. That regular criminal court seemed to be kind of not doing the best that it could. Even though the professionals involved were doing the best they could, the system itself seemed kind of stuck and not responding fast enough or quickly enough. Coming up with this accountability court process, allowing the resources to be there and focused, allowing us to have a dedicated judge, what that did is it was really a stress test for the system, and I think it shows that when we have the resources and investments and we are focused on the goal of due process, protecting the individual's constitutional and civil rights through this process, making sure their rights are protected, pushing the cases through the system as opposed to just having repeated status conferences and status conferences where two or three retail thefts take twelve months to resolve because there's just status after status after status. Here, we didn't really do that. We had maybe, I would say on average, probably three hearings and the first one was welcome to the court, we're doing something different. The second hearing was how long do you need to get the treatment plan or the plea agreement in place? The third hearing was usually the change of plea, and that was over a three to four week period. I think there was a lot of apprehension at first from the defense bar about, well, this is just another avenue, a quicker avenue to throw people in prison, but that's not how the law works. The prosecutors alone can't make decisions like that. We can advocate for a certain outcome, whether it's pretrial or post conviction, but it's ultimately always the judge. Here, Judge Malay made those decisions. Sometimes I didn't even ask for cash bail, but Judge Malay made his own analysis and felt the person was at risk of flight and imposed cash bail. What our system requires, regardless if it's the accountability court or regular criminal court, is an individualized approach to these defendants as people, the allegations that are against them, and the underlying issues that they present and have, coupled with our concerns as prosecutors about victim safety, victim input, as well as the broader public safety. I think when we get the slide up, you'll see we have a broad based, really broad based outcome for the cases that resolved, where we had 79 defendants by 02/06/2026 resolve their cases. Of those, 22 ended up with prison sentences 17 went to straight probation, meaning they never went to a correctional facility. We had eight end up in treatment court, and what we found by linking the Howard Center, who was already ingrained with the treatment court, plus bringing in AHS providers, is we found some of these people would really benefit from this type of intensive accountability court process that's wrapped in substance or mental health treatment. I worked with Sarah's office and DSA, Andrew McFarland, who runs the Chittenden County Treatment Court, and we were able to resolve eight different defendants for treatment court. That's every two weeks. They go in front of Judge Griffin. They have to do UAs. They have to go to counseling. They have a whole slew of requirements that are above and beyond just people on normal probation. We had another eight that did split to serve. Split to serve means that ultimately it's a probationary sentence, but there's a component of that typically upfront that they do in prison. Some of those were thirty day split to serves, some of them were eighteen months. It depends on, again, the victim input, the victim's feeling of safety, public safety, and the level of allegation that we had against them and the crime that they committed. We have three that ended up with the ACS program. The ACS program is called the Alternative Community Supervision Program. It's created by DOC to fill the gap for a work crew. It requires the defendant to complete so many hours of community service in the first fourteen or twenty days, and if they don't complete it, they end up serving a prison sentence. What I found is I think of the three that did ACS, I think two were successful and did it, and one didn't and went to prison. Then we had seven who ended up in our not competent bucket. That really didn't change from day one. I think when I started October 20, we had about six or seven, and those are the six or seven that finished in that outcome. Three of those were O and Hs, four of those were just not competent, so there's a difference. There was nothing, unfortunately, the accountability court could do with the mental health system. That is one area that we could not address or change any outcomes, even if we could bring them and link them up with a service provider related to mental health. Once a defendant is found not competent, there's really nothing for criminal prosecutors to do. We unfortunately are required to continue with the case. DMH becomes involved a little bit and then you have the defendant has a defense attorney, but they get assigned legal aid attorney and a guardian ad litem. The majority of these people, four, were just found not competent. They were not hospitalized. There was no order of non hospitalization, and so their cases were just dismissed and they were released back to the community. If we're looking at defendants who in terms of a definition of success of how many of these defendants will come back, I can guarantee you that the majority of those seven will come back because of the failures and gaps in the mental health system here in Vermont. Some of those resolutions included my office, as I know Sarah has, fighting with DMH about why can't we get an O and H? Why can't this person be hospitalized? This person is accused of a crime of violence from six months ago. How are they not a threat to themselves? The system is built so that the defense attorneys and legal aid and GAL sit on their hands because hospitalization is akin, in some respects, to defense attorneys as continued incarceration. If the choice is let your do something to get your client back into the community or move them from a prison to a hospital, they're always going to go for back to the community. Where we really struggle as prosecutors is are the last member of court, the last party in court to know anything about their mental health status. That changed a little bit with our release with these defendants here in the accountability court, but overall we are the worst position criminal prosecutors are to deal with people that the court has found not competent because the defense and DMH know all about their mental health treatment providers, history, and the prosecutors we don't unless we get a court order, and sometimes the court doesn't allow it. Unfortunately, those seven individuals were essentially released to the community with very limited to no oversight and questionable engagement in services. Those were the big gap, I think, of the 79 defendants I dealt with and resolved. Those seven I'm very concerned about because of the gap here in our mental health system. Overall, I think we resolved a heck of a lot of cases. I think we helped a lot of people, and I could not have done it without Sarah George and her support. I utilized her administrative staff because everything's got to be turned over to the defense and submitted to court, and her victim advocates in her office were a huge part in allowing us to very quickly resolve cases because they had to, instead of having a couple of weeks to a month contacting victims, sometimes you have to have multiple conversations to lower a victim's anxiety to bring them into court. We had a seven to ten day turnaround on this, and so the victim advocates in Sarah's office really stepped up, the admin stepped up. I had a desk in Sarah's office, and so I think we worked really well on and we met weekly, talking all the time. I think her office and I and her and I worked really well to to get a handle on this population and and to achieve the success that we have.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you. So we'll hold questions until after Sarah, and then we'll get back to questions. So let's have first, and then we'll go to questions.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: Thank you. I I do wanna save a lot of time for questions because I imagine there are plenty. I think the one thing I would just add is that we have significantly by by getting rid of 700 cases on our docket, that has taken an enormous burden off the rest of us. So not only while it was happening was Zach's work able to take burden off from our deputies in the moment so that we could focus on the many homicide trials we had this past year. Our attempted murders, our violent felonies, we really were able to focus on those in a way that has been we focused on them previously, but it has been at the expense of all of these other cases. So we were able to really focus on it in a way that was super powerful for us. And going forward, we have less cases. Right? So our goal, obviously, is to keep our caseloads down. Coming into this, I think the the deputies in my office that do the criminal docket had over 400 cases, myself included, had 300 plus cases. And getting rid of 700 of those has our case loads are the lowest they've been since I've been a prosecutor probably in fifteen years. So that part of it is obviously a huge benefit for us. Going forward, with those cases down, our hope is that we never really get back to that point, that by continuing to figure out a way to do a a sort of alternative docket, we have decided that I will become that that that role, judge Catums, is gonna be the judge assigned. And every Friday, we will keep open one courtroom where we just deal with folks that have five plus dockets. And that will allow for that quick scheduling of a case so that the the behavior can be addressed quicker in a way that it just previously was not able to. So if somebody comes in today and they pick up their fifth docket, they will be scheduled for a Friday in the next week or two. They will never be scheduled more than two weeks out, which, like Zach said previously, it was months before they're coming back to court. And in that time, they're picking up three or four new retail thefts or whatever the behavior is. So I do think that we will be able to keep those cases from really getting to the point that they were by now having room in our court and room in our docket to prioritize them in a way that we didn't before because we have not just cleared these 700 dockets, but we have cleared a significant percentage of our pending homicides and attempted homicide cases. I will highlight the admin and victim advocate aspect of this really cannot be understated. It was an enormous burden for our admins, for advocates, to have to turn around the same work that they typically do in three months between a case in two days, three days, or a week. And even the dismissal of some of the cases, people have been on arrest warrant status. And for several years, Zach dismissed those cases. That was just work we didn't have time to do. So even if we could have, we just I there was two people that I've been meaning to do it for a long time because they've been missing for a long time. I'm not even sure they're still alive. And one of them I know is incarcerated out of state. I just didn't have the time to do it. So I think that the having that additional person here to prioritize it was just instrumental in that in that success. And I do think that going forward, having any courthouse that can and I know Chittenden County is lucky, obviously, in in that we do have multiple courtrooms and we have multiple judges, which not every county has. Most counties, I think, don't have. But because we are able to have that time set aside And it was important to us that it be the same day so that if somebody does forget their court date, we can at least tell them Friday. Come into the courthouse on a Friday, and we will we will prioritize your cases because some folks don't even have a phone to keep track of these days. And to have the service providers in the courthouse, again, cannot really cannot be understated. The amount of people that get lost between the courtroom and the service that they need is most of the people that we're talking about. So having a warm handout in the courtroom, connecting people directly with the services, and really having those service providers in the moment cut down the barriers that so many people face once they leave the courthouse was something that every courthouse should have and, I think, really instrumental to the success.

[Speaker 0]: Questions? I think I saw Senator Zahalski and then Representative Carsenault and then representative Rachelson.

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: Thank you. I do have some questions. One one of the things that you mentioned was sort of the gaps in the mental health system, and I'm wondering if you could identify what would be helpful to change within that system to better support the people who are falling through those routines.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: Yeah. Go ahead.

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: Go all that after.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Yeah. I think that there are different classes of of people that need mental health support that we deal with as prosecutors, right? You have those that are charged with incredibly serious violent crimes like attempted murder, aggravated assault with a weapon, or murder that are not competent. I think a forensic facility where those people can be placed and access services with, frankly, a competency restoration process would be very helpful. For the people I was dealing with, which were by and large retail thefts and unlawful trespass but found not competent, need certainly as a prosecutor, I need better clarity from the state Department of Mental Health in terms of what is available for an O and H versus an order of hospitalization, and just getting someone released, for instance, from prison to the community on an order of non hospitalization to engage in services. These are people who struggle to abide by notice against trespasses. They struggle to abide by court order conditions of release. I'm not sure just having a court issue an order of non hospitalization that says continue with your treatment is going do anything, especially because again, state prosecutors, we're the last to know if he violates, he or she violates, and even though we're the ones required with kind of litigating that aspect of it, Once it's in place and ordered by the court, the order of non hospitalization that is, then DMH oversees it and determines whether they're going to discharge early, extend it, and there's really no role for us.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: And I think the for some of the folks that I know didn't end up on ONHs and something we see all the time is folks who are found not competent, often due to a major mental illness, but aren't interested in engaging in services, Department of Mental Health won't make them do an order of nonhospitalization. And so they'll just say, they don't want treatment. We're not gonna do an O and H. And we can't prosecute the person because they've been found not confident. And so we end up we end up having to dismiss all of their cases because there's no other option. And the message that often sends to those folks is, well, we'll just keep doing that. And at least one of the people has already started. I think he's close to five dockets again because I mean, one, he is mentally ill. He has a major mental illness. But there is also I know, given things he has said, he knows that nothing's gonna happen. Luckily, his cases are not violent. They are mostly trespasses. But it is a it is a major gap. Of course, individuals who are struggling with mental health often don't want to engage in services, don't know how to really accurately or properly engage in services. And so we are stuck in a position to have to dismiss cases with very upset, angry victims, and it is not our there is nothing we can do about it. I will just take this opportunity to say when I first started as a deputy state's attorney, the moment that somebody was found not competent, the attorney general's office stepped in, and the AAG for DMH took over the case. And they have a direct line of contact to the mental health world, to all of the service providers. And we I would come in for court and someone would be found out competent, and Kristen Chandler, AAG Chandler, was standing there and was like, I've got this and took over the entire case. And that to me makes sense because they represent the Department of Mental Health. They have better access to all the records. Right now, the DMH won't even give us the records. We have to subpoena them. And it's a barrier that I think historically was not there. And it made a lot more sense as an office to have DMH or the AAGs take over a case once we were no longer able to prosecute. Just a broader perspective, what are the service gaps? I I

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: hear you were connecting a lot of people to services, which we know is really important, but I imagine there were some services that would have really benefited people that simply don't exist or had long waiting lists. This is a very specific service gap, but I'm wondering on the broader picture.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Yeah, broader, I think housing. Housing, housing, housing. That was the number one focus in terms of a defense attorney talking to me or our care team about, yes, they might have substance use or a co occurring mental health issue, but they're living in a tent in Burlington and it's 10 degrees. If we change their plea and get them under DOC sentence, is there a DOC supported housing? There was, but there's not 150 beds. I think at one point, we were dealing with four beds, and we were juggling six to seven people of who would get those beds. I think housing for a lot of this population is key, and that's in Burlington, and that's in Barrie, where I'm mainly with Washington County. I think it's true in probably St. Johnsbury and Rutland is we can set them up and provide resources and we can have Howard Center, we can have Washington County Mental Health, we can have these support people ready to engage with them, and they are likewise, in turn, the defendant's engaging as well, but they are still struggling with housing instability. I think the data nationally just shows it is exponentially more likely they're either going to re offend or relapse, and so I think housing was the biggest hurdle.

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: I have other questions, but I wanna Okay. Get a general

[Speaker 0]: Representative Arsenault and representative Rachelson.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault]: Thanks so much for this report. I'm it's interesting hearing what you just described in the in the process and the people involved. To me, sounds like best practice. I've been, you know, like national models. This is don't think that anything we had to invent anything. We had to just implement what's already been shown to be effective. But I'm interest so I'm really glad we did that, and I hope we can continue to do that. And I thank you all for your part in it. You Zach mentioned I think you said there were three things that you identified that were key to the success, and I got two of them, I think. So dedicated judge and court time, service providers present in the courtroom, and I think I missed it.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Yeah. And the third one is communication.

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: Okay.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: The ability to have a release, one single release where all the service providers and the attorneys can talk. Communication involves the defense counsel as well. A lot of the times we're all overworked that we're talking about an overburdened. We're talking about the defendant whose status conference is on at nine we're talking about that at 08:55 before we go into court. This process allowed us to all sit around a table like this in a conference room weekly and have a long ranging, week long discussion or longer about the defense attorney's client, and it wasn't adversarial. It wasn't me as prosecutor going, I'm going to put your client in jail, and the defense going, Well, you don't have any evidence like we do in court sometimes. It was more of, Okay, the allegations are over here. We all recognize the underlying issues. How do we put a plan together so this person frankly doesn't come back? Once we have that plan, then the defense and I would go to a separate room and have a conversation of what does the outcome look like? From public safety standpoint, I think this person needs to be on furlough as opposed to probation, or I'm only going to do two serve, so talk to your client first before we go down the treatment plan. But I think upfront communication, especially with that standard release that allowed all the service providers to talk, I think was the third key.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault]: Can I ask if this if that how do I want to say this? To me, that sounds like a much more humane approach to this whole endeavor, and I wonder how that impacted your experience as a prosecutor, like you personally.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: I think it made it made quite the impression on me. I'm I'm going to try and bring this type of approach to Washington County, bring DOC to the table upfront, try to have a conversation with the defense attorney, not necessarily about the level of evidence and allegations, but about the underlying needs. You know, was a defense attorney for ten years prior to becoming a prosecutor, and my approach with representing a client was never litigate first. It was always litigate last, right? Because you and Sarah and Sarah and her office prosecuted some of my clients. I always went to Sarah or a deputy in her office, and I said, Here, we have some evidentiary issues, but first, let me tell you who my client is. He went to rehab, and she did this, and here's all the documents. Now, presuming you've got excellent evidence that's bulletproof because of all this underlying issues, and now you see this defendant not as a defendant but a human being, what can we work out? I think when you start there, you kind of take the sting of the adversarial process out of it, and it allows people to kind of really focus on the best approach as opposed to the best approach for me or my agency, and I think that was a big part of getting these resolutions and getting these people involved, and having the defendant as part of it too. They weren't part of our weekly meetings, their attorney was, but in court, Judge Malay, I think more than any other judge in regular court would allow the defendant to talk and it wasn't like, oh, oh, anything you say is going to be used against you. It was the defendant was like, we had some defendants that were like, hey, I don't want to be in jail, judge but because I'm in jail, my diabetes is under control, I didn't lose my foot. It was those types of conversations, and so if I can get a resolution where I can have meds and I can get back on Medicaid, those were the conversations that we were allowing to happen from a defendant's perspective in court on the record as opposed to typically they're told to stay quiet and, hey, this prosecutor in the room, don't don't say anything.

[Speaker 0]: Thanks. I'm representative Rachelson, then representative Oliver Oliver.

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: Thank you. So I have a couple of questions, and I'm hoping they're sort of shortish. But so is there any data on if crime decreased in Chittenden County or complaints that people were complaining, like Church Street merchants or and will there be any follow-up data in terms of six months from now, a year from now?

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: Yeah. I mean, Zach has been really great about collecting all the data, and the governor's office has made all these great slides. And I intend on using his spreadsheets and continuing the data so that I can send it off to somebody else smarter than me to make more graphs later to determine recidivism rates and things of that nature. The Chittenden County data in general, as you know, is not good. So I don't know that we'll ever be able to say, like, crime rates went down, and it's all because of this. Our crime rates also always go down in the winter. So that's a a little piece of it that's difficult to sparse out. I know in my conversations with business owners, and I think that Tim's conversations at the chambers has they are definitely seeing a benefit to this. But, again, they have also acknowledged that they always see those numbers go down a little bit. So I think this spring, summer will probably be the bigger test and a better way to figure that out. But I don't know that we'll ever have a really great way to know for sure the impact of this versus, for example, the continuation of it and the way that we're going to do it or even just our general caseloads being down and so having more time to focus on these, which all ties back to it.

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: But I think it'll be a really hard thing to sparse out exactly what led to what. So this model seems like, as Representative Arsenault said, it seems like an amazing model. And I'm wondering if we, as a state, decided we wanted this model for most of the cases that come to court, Because it feels like those ads where you can pay now this, or you'll pay more later. So I guess I'm wondering, especially for the cases that involve people struggling, getting to sit in on the court one day was amazing and reminded me a lot of treatment court, which So I'm familiar I guess I'm wondering, were you two sort of see this as being a paradigm shift for our criminal justice system?

[Unidentified Senator (referred to by Chair as 'Senator Zahalski')]: Go ahead.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: I think the great thing about Vermont is that we have 14 counties, and they are essentially 14 different planets in some respects. That's the great thing. Yeah, because teach, you know, Orleans County culture is different than Caledonia County culture and Grand Isle County culture. Like, that's great about such a small state with people who care. So I think this model that the governor's idea and plan had here in Chittenden County for the accountability court can work statewide. I think that we have to be realistic. As the governor told me last week, we have to be nimble. We have to understand that Rutland County is going to have different gaps than Chittenden County did. Washington County, where I work, is going to have different gaps than Rutland. I think overall with the flexibility in the court schedule, the dedicated service providers, and the ability to have open and honest communication upfront about these issues, I think that can be imposed in each county, and then it's for them in those counties, Rutland, Washington, Windham, to use their existing culture and services to really take it off. But I think if we just say, well, we did it this way in Chittenden, these are the 12 steps, so Rutland and Washington County have to do it, I don't think that's going to work, but I think if we kept this framework now of flexible court schedule, service providers engaged in the service upfront, including DOC upfront, and open and honest communication with a release, and that's the expectation going in, then I think the counties could build around that. I will say though that from my perspective as both a voter and as a criminal attorney, you're paying more for not doing something like this. Right, exactly. Might be a big check up front to say, Oh, let's get the service providers, let's create system in Rutland and Washington in these six counties versus statewide because you know, I don't think you need this in Grand Isle and Essex where there's 120 cases and one attorney which is the state's attorney, right? But in probably about six of the counties, you probably do need it. Right now, what Sarah and I and law enforcement and the mental health system deal with, it's a surge of crisis and then that's resolved, surge of crisis and then that's resolved, surge of crisis and then that's resolved, whereas we're trying to get ahead of that and tamp that down, and so that costs more upfront but actually saves more in the back end.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: Great. The one thing I would just add to that too, and I think going to your point, Zach was able I think right now there's is it 19 left with, like, five or more dockets? So from my perspective, I keep thinking, like, then why are we waiting for someone to get till five? Like, maybe we should be running a list now that this number is more manageable of, like, how many have two or three so that we don't have to wait for two more victims to get to to connect this person with services. So I am curious. We could not have done that before, though. Like, running a number with two or three triage. Yeah. We triage. Yeah. And I think that most counties that have this issue are gonna have to triage by starting five. But I do think long term, and for me, starting this sort of new version of this, maybe it makes sense to move people into that when they're at three.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: And a and a big hurdle, but what I think is also a component of success is transport deputies. The fact that Sheriff Gamblyn in Chittenden County had the staff, personnel, people power, and the ability to bring held defendants to court daily is not something we have in Washington County. I don't think it exists in most counties. Washington County is an institution desert. We don't have a prison. In Chittenden, the sheriff could go fifteen minutes to CRCF, grab the female defendant, and go maybe forty minutes, maybe a fifty minute turnaround at Swan. In Washington County, for instance, we struggle because the two sheriffs have to drive basically almost two to three hours round trip to St. Jay to pick up one person, and so every county is a little different, but I think we really benefited from our judge going, Issue a transport order, bring this person in so that they're involved in their case as well.

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: I have one last very specific question about the people who are found not competent, Because we, our committee, have been hearing from providers who are very frustrated as well. So one of the things that we talked about, one is, should there be some change about AGs taking the case? I hadn't heard that before. But what if a provider is required to report if it's a court order and people are not complying? I know when people, for part of their sentence, came to Lund, if they left, we were required to let people know that they weren't engaged in treatment. So I'm wondering about that. Or we heard about people who are like, You're just not going to get evaluated. Nothing's happening. But it seems like if we dealt with, If you refuse to get evaluated, then we're going to assume, for lack of other reasons, you're competent Like, so that we end some of those weird places that people just go into the ether.

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: I think they're reporting it to DMH, but they're not reporting it to the state's state's So we don't know because the order says they're under the DMH custody. The service provider might say they didn't show up for three appointments, but they're telling that to DMH, and our offices never know about that.

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: But if it's a court order, couldn't they also be letting?

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: But it's also statutory. So if you're placing the defendant in the custody of DMH, our office has no role. And so the custodian gets alerted on top of the court order. Think the other issue 94%

[Kate McManus (Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: of the mutual fund is inquiring if the legislature made a statutory change that if the court ordered DMH to inform the prosecutors of no shows or that be helpful?

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: Depends on what we could do with that information. Yes. Because we don't again, the AAGs are the ones that move to hospitalize someone if they're not engaging. So that

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: would be another part of the statute.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: And it would be a much more direct link for them to tell the AAG and then the AAG. Do we

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: know how that policy changed? I have no idea.

[Sarah George (Chittenden County State’s Attorney)]: I think when Kristen moved on to a different job, it just never nobody

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: Well, and and the legislature did change the competency evaluation statute a few years ago that allowed for an arrest warrant, and so what I have seen over the years is since that change is if the defendant misses two or more evaluations and the defense attorney is still like, Hey judge, I meet with this person, talk with them, I think they're not competent, instead of just going, Oh, we're going to presume you're competent because you missed the appointment. Typically those people are going to have cash bail imposed, be held while they're doing the evaluation. That's where the judge would go with the next step as opposed to just going, Well, this person doesn't care. We're going to presume competence, and so the person gets evaluated and we're left with it. The weird statutory construction of competency issues is that the defense attorney asks the court to order an evaluation of competency. That becomes a neutral under law, a neutral court appointed expert that is retained and paid for by DMH. That person typically by video like WebEx or Teams, meets with them, assesses them, produces a report, and then if the report is competent and the defense attorney disagrees, they get their own expert. Let's say their expert says that defendant is not competent. They have an expert that they've paid for that can appear in court in person and testify and for some reason the state prosecutors are left with the court appointed expert who we didn't pick, don't know anything about, didn't even ask for, but now under state law, we're required to fork over 3,000 to $10,000 for that person to appear by video, not in person, even though their contract with DMH says they don't have to do any of

[Speaker 0]: this. And

[Zach Waite (Special Prosecutor; Deputy State’s Attorney, Washington County)]: so that's just to have a contested competency hearing. Once you get into hospitalization, not me, but at Sarah's level, at the SA level, you have to make a decision of, am I going to spend 3 to 10 or more thousand dollars to hire a psychiatrist to assess this person to argue they should be in the hospital when our budget at the EDO is limited for that, and that really needs to be focused on people who commit murder and attempted murder versus somebody who has seventeen eleven trespasses. Boils down to the statutory structure kind of puts handcuffs on the prosecutors, and then on top of that we have to make budgetary decisions where we're like, we're not going to pursue this so that we can pursue hospitalization for an attempted murderer.

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson]: Right. But of course, them coming back to court five times is probably gonna cost you 3 to $10,000 anyway. Yeah. Right? But not in cash that you're handing over. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Alright. Representative Oliver, I think you're gonna have the last questions because

[Rep. Thomas Oliver]: Yeah. I'm I'm just gonna say you've answered my question already just a moment ago, and I was gonna ask going forward about, staffing when you switch up the judge situation. But I see the folks are probably more prepared to answer that walk in.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah. And, also, just real quick. On on Friday, we're gonna have, DSAS and the department of state's attorneys in to talk about their budget, and we'll also talk about kind of the going forward, you know, what kind of, staffing and such they're gonna need, to try to implement this. So this so will be a continuing conversation, which we'll take up with the Department of State's attorneys on Friday afternoon. But we'll just take a short break. We'll be back at twenty after, and we'll start with Judge Zonay.