By Michael Bielawski
A Republican lawmaker from Newport is concerned that the state’s court systems are not issuing strong enough rulings for serious and repeat crimes. The issue came up when the House Appropriations Committee met December 19 to discuss crime-related issues including an ongoing case backlog last week.
Rep. Woodman Page (R-Newport), an Appropriations Committee member, addressed the issue during the session. “My colleagues and I, we sat in one day on some court proceedings in Newport, and we recognize that there is a backlog and work is being done to make progress on that,” Page said.
He suggested that lenient court rulings could be contributing to the problem.
“The concern is that some of these rulings are not beneficial to the public related to safety,” he said.
Rep. Martin Lalonde, D-South Burlington and Chair of House Judiciary, responded. He suggested that the time gap between the offense and the consequence – regardless of what that consequence may be – is the bigger problem.
“What I’m focusing on for the Appropriations Committee is not what those consequences are at the end, whether that’s more incarceration, probation, deferred sentences, there’s deferral to Community Justice Centers,” he said. “I’m not talking about the consequences, what those are so much, it’s the time frame between the offense and the consequence.”
Nonetheless, Lalonde argues that lighter penalties are more beneficial than harsher ones. He goes as far as to suggest that probation is a “higher deterrence” than jail time.
He says, “There are studies that say that probation you have much better outcomes than incarceration for instance. So reports that are focused on doing more probation, they are following what the research says is a higher deterrence value.”
He talks about the option of “precharge diversion” which is when offenders for certain nonviolent offenses can engage in other community-based programs instead of jail time or other consequences.
“One of our other bills is looking at expanding precharge diversion,” Lalonde said. “If you have precharge diversion you have even closer consequences under a different roof from a Community Justice Center or Restorative Justice but it’s still consequences closer to the offense and also takes pressure off the courts.”
Page acknowledged these efforts but argued that there is still a public perception that courts are not being tough enough on offenders. “That’s all well and good and I get it but there is a perception out there that the rulings are not as strong as perhaps they should be,” he said. “So I’ll just leave it there.”
Lalonde said it’s unclear if state’s attorney offices need more staff to push through their workloads.
“So state’s attorneys, I think what you are seeing here mostly is that they have very high caseloads but one shouldn’t just look at the caseloads to determine how many state’s attorneys should be in a particular office. It’s the workload, these are two very different things.
“Caseload you look at the number of active or pending cases but they are doing a lot more. The time that they spend for instance on helping investigations in the murders for instance, you know I’ve heard from Rutland’s Ian Sullivan [Chief Deputy State’s Attorney for Rutland County] and how much time they’re spending with for doing that kind of work.”
Earlier in the meeting Lalonde went over some statistics regarding the extent of the backlog. 21% of felony cases are over 360 days old, and 38% of misdemeanors are more than 180 days old.
The author is a reporter for the Vermont Daily Chronicle