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The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering a proposal that will allow for greater “flexibility” to reduce sentences for certain inmates in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Currently, a sentence can be modified within 90 days of it being formally imposed.
Chief Superior Court Judge Brian Grearson pitched a proposal to the Senate Judiciary Committee during a video conference Friday that would allow sentences to be reviewed after that 90-day window, provided both the defense attorney and the prosecution are in agreement.
“This is just to give, quite frankly, not the court, but the parties, the attorneys, more flexibility with some of these folks who are incarcerated,” Grearson said. “If they don’t agree, it wouldn’t give us any authority.”
The committee took no action on the proposal Friday.
“I haven’t made up my mind here whether to do it or not do it,” Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington and committee chair, said during the meeting, later adding, “We are going to take up it next week and have more discussion on it.”
Sears did say he had concerns about just trying to“unload” prisoners from a correctional facility into the community at this time.
“They are coming out in very difficult times,” the senator said, adding that jobs and housing will be hard to come by. “I can’t think of a worse time to come out, particularly if you are a person without structure.”
Sen. Alice Nitka, D-Windsor, and a committee member, expressed concern about moving forward with the legislation. “I don’t think we’d want it in a bill we want to pass,” she said.
Advocates for prisoners have been calling for the state Department of Corrections and the Scott administration to release as many inmates “as possible” in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Particularly, they urged the release of older inmates as well as prisoners with medical conditions that make them more likely to contract the contravirus, especially in such close quarters at a prison.
The Department of Corrections has so far rebutted those calls for emergency furloughs of certain classes of prisoners, and say fewer offenders are entering the facilities reducing the total inmate population by 155 to 1,500 prisoners in the past two weeks.
Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden and a Senate Judiciary Committee member, asked during the meeting Friday if the proposal was aimed specifically at reducing sentences.
“It’s driven by what we had been seeing in the courts and reading newspapers and reports,” Grearson replied. “There are certain individuals who are under sentence that could be released, everyone agrees they could be released, except the sentence structure itself is preventing them from being released.”
He added, “These are people that are not getting programming, they’re essentially doing dead time and they’re going to be released, some of them in a relatively short period of time, but there is no way to restructure their sentence, they are not eligible for furlough.”
Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio, whose office represents most defendants in the state, and Assistant Attorney David Scherr, who both took part in the video conference, each said they supported the proposal.
Sears asked Scherr if he anticipated a large number of prisoners would try to take advantage of such a provision if enacted.
“I think we can expect that there will be a decent number of requests,” he said. “But the reality is that there is no way to force anything into court without the agreement of the state’s attorney or the attorney general.”
John Campbell, executive director of the state Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, who also took part in the video conference, spoke out against the proposal.
“I think people are forgetting about the victims here,” Campbell said.
He said changes in sentences could occur in cases long since been closed.
The proposal, he said, if approved, would leave an “uncertainty” in the lives of victims.
“If you allow this now past the 90 days,” Campbell said, “what you’re doing is saying that any sentence for anybody, any crime, any criminal act is open for consideration again.”
He said if the proposal does move forward he would like it made clear that if a case was prosecuted by a state’s attorney, it would have to be that state’s attorney’s office to agree to a modification. And, he said, if a case was prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Office, it would be that office who would need to sign off on a modification.
Campbell said he would want the prosecution office that had the most knowledge of the case to be the one to sign off on a sentence reduction.
Dale Crook, director of field services for the state Department of Corrections, said during the meeting Friday that his department was “kind of neutral” on the proposal since it involved court processes.
He did say that at this “emergent time,” anything that “would allow a sentence to be reconsidered to allow individuals to be released from the facilities we would be in support of that.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Senate panel explores proposal to give ‘flexibility’ to reduce prison sentences.
