Gov. Phil Scott said Friday that he is reserving judgment on whether the state is responsible for the death of a Black inmate who died in a Vermont prison last year, despite a damning review by the state’s Defender General’s Office.
The governor said he was still awaiting more information from another probe by outside investigators into the death last December of 60-year-old Kenneth Johnson, of Staten Island, New York.
However, two other top state officials overseeing the state’s prison system, Agency of Human Services Secretary Mike Smith and interim Department of Corrections Commissioner James Baker, have both said they have seen enough to make their own determination.
“We are responsible for this, and we should take responsibility, there is no excuse for this,” Smith said Friday during a twice-weekly press conference held by the governor.
Earlier this week, Baker made comments similar to Smith’s.
But Scott, at the Friday press conference, was not willing to go as far.
“I’m just saying I’d like to get through the investigation,” Scott said.
‘I’d like to get the information first, before I comment further on that and take full responsibility for it,” the governor said. He later added, “But certainly from what I’ve seen this far it appears that we made a tremendous amount of mistakes along the way.”
Smith has called on former U.S. Attorney Tristram Coffin and the law firm Downs Rachlin Martin to conduct a probe into Johnson’s death.
A summary of a report on the Defender General’s Prisoners’ Rights Office investigation into Johnson’s death was made public this week. The document stated that Johnson died of an undiagnosed cancerous tumor in his throat, and his pleas to corrections and medical staff that he couldn’t breathe went ignored.
Also, at times he was threatened by those expected to be caring for him, including in the hours before his death when he told a corrections staffer he couldn’t breathe and got a response telling him to “knock it off.”
The Defender General’s Office also alleges that Johnson’s race played a role in his treatment at the prison.
Another report by Disability Rights Vermont has also been provided to the state, though it hasn’t been released to the public. Officials with Disability Rights Vermont have said their report also had a harsh view of the care Johnson’s received in prison, using the terms “abuse” and “neglect.”
Johnson had been jailed at the Northern State Correctional Center in Newport since September 2017, awaiting trial on sex assault and human trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty to those charges.
Baker, who was not commissioner at the time of Johnson’s death in December, said last week that the corrections department had hired a new contracted health care provider.
The department dropped Virginia-based Centurion Managed Care and signed on with VitalCore Health Strategies of Kansas. Centurion had been on the job for the past five years, but a request for proposals resulted in the selection of VitalCore, the company that was also the lowest bidder.
Smith, at the press conference Friday, said that following Johnson’s death the corrections department did not conduct its own internal investigation. The Defender General’s Office alleged in its review that the department was “complicit in covering up” by not conducting an “internal administrative review” of the care provided by Centurion, the contracted health care provider.
Smith said he didn’t know why an internal investigation was not done at the time of Johnson’s death in December, though he believed there should have been one.
The Vermont-based firm Downs Rachlin Martin will examine why the state did not conduct an investigation, he said, adding that he authorized the law firm to share its findings, if warranted, with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont.
Smith said the probe will also look at what role racism played in Johnson’s death.
“And since the prisoner was African American,’” Smith said, “then we have to ask the hard question, and look ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘Would we have handled this prisoner differently if he was white?’”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Scott won’t say yet if state is responsible for Black inmate’s death.