This post was updated at 8:47 p.m.
Gov. Phil Scott has asked Attorney General TJ Donovan to review a Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s decision to dismiss charges in three major cases that included the insanity defense.
Sarah George announced Tuesday that she was dropping charges in two high-profile murder cases and one attempted murder case after determining there was not enough evidence to rebut the defendants’ planned insanity defenses.
The individuals whose charges were dropped are: Louis Fortier, charged with a murder on Church Street in Burlington in March 2017; Aita Gurung, charged for murdering his wife in October 2017 with a meat cleaver in Burlington; and Veronica Lewis, charged with attempted murder for shooting her firearms instructor in 2015 in Westford.
Scott’s letter to Donovan, dated Wednesday, described the cases as “among the most violent crimes committed in Vermont in recent memory” and stated that with their dismissal, the Department of Corrections will not be able to supervise the perpetrators after their release.
“From a layperson’s perspective, and certainly as Governor, I’m at a loss as to the logic or strategy behind this decision to drop all charges – especially considering the fact that the State’s Attorney is aware the Department of Mental Health has no legal authority to continue to keep individuals hospitalized when they do not meet the legal criteria for hospital level of care,” Scott wrote.
Scott wrote that he wanted Donovan to request a thorough review and determine if his office should re-file the charges in any or all of the cases.
“The top priority of government is public safety, and I certainly don’t take this obligation lightly. A civil society cannot function properly when a heinous violent crime is not properly adjudicated, and the public is put at risk,” Scott wrote.
In an interview Wednesday, she defended her decision to call for the dismissals.
On Twitter Thursday, George said she exhaustively considered the options for handling the cases, and defended her office’s actions.
“To believe that I would not have considered EVERY SINGLE alternative and LEGAL option before making my final decision is insulting to myself, all of the attorneys involved in this process and to the victims and their families,” she wrote.
Facts and prosecutorial ethics factor are the basis of her decisions as state’s attorney, she said. “I have not made ANY decisions based on politics, and I will absolutely not start now,” she wrote.
She also noted she did not get a heads up from the governor that he was critical of her decision.
“I cant help but think if he really wanted answers, he would have found me,” she wrote.
Donovan said he would gather more information before deciding how he would respond to Scott’s letter, and it was too early to say whether he would refile the cases.
“You’re not doing your job as a prosecutor if you say, yes, I’m going to refile a case without reviewing the evidence of the case and understanding the state of the evidence, the strengths and the weaknesses of the evidence and understanding some of the challenges that are present,” he said in an interview Thursday.
Donovan said along with learning more about the cases themselves, he was planning on working with the Department of Mental Health to better understand all the options on the table for the three individuals involved to ensure public safety.
Donovan said it was a balancing act between respecting George’s decision as a duly-elected prosecutor while acknowledging the public safety implications of the decision to dismiss the charges. While the AG’s office does have jurisdiction, Donovan said the precedent of reversing a local prosecutor’s decision was a concern.
“It is a rare circumstance that the attorney general would take over dismissed cases,” Donovan said. “Because of that, there needs to be exceptional and extraordinary reasons to do that. Public safety may be those exceptional or extraordinary reason to refile a dismissed case from an independently elected prosecutor.”
George had told Donovan that she intended on dismissing the charges, and Donovan had arranged a meeting to discuss the decision.
“I was hoping we could all sit down and talk first, but that didn’t happen,” Donovan said. “We are where we are, and now we need to move forward.”
VTDigger reported yesterday that Donovan was “having conversations” about running for governor and seriously considering a run. Donovan said that he would not speculate on if the governor’s intentions with the letters were political.
Prior to attorney general, Donovan served as Chittenden County State’s Attorney.
In announcing the dismissal of the cases, George said each of the defendants had submitted opinions from psychiatrists that they were insane at the time of the crime, and that the state received evidence from each of a long history of major mental illness diagnoses and previous psychiatric hospitalizations.
In an interview Wednesday, George told VTDigger that the state did not have the evidence to rebut the insanity defense in any of the cases.
“We don’t have a forensic psychiatrist who found, or opinionated, that these three individuals were sane at the time,” George said. “And it’s my belief as an officer of the court and in my ethical obligations as a prosecutor, I can not go to trial on a case I know that I know we do not have expert testimony to rebut the defense.”
This story was updated at 4:05 to include comments from AG Donovan.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Gov. Phil Scott requests AG review of insanity case dismissals.