The House and Senate Judiciary chairs agree that an urgent criminal justice problem facing Vermont is increased abuse of prescription drugs, but they otherwise diverge on their legislative plans for the next session.
“Prescription drug abuse is a major cause of crime. It needs to be dealt with, and hasn’t gone away,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Sears, D-Bennington. “That’s my No. 1 priority.”
Last year, legislation stalled as the House and the Senate clashed over how much access law enforcement officials should have to the Vermont Prescription Drug Monitoring System, with Sears arguing that limited access would help the state combat an “epidemic” of opiate abuse.
Sears still supports “very limited access by those people who are skilled investigators,” he told VTDigger. Sears’ counterpart, Rep. Bill Lippert, D-Hinesburg, does not support law enforcement access to the database, which tracks the prescription and distribution of drugs prone to abuse.
“It’s important for the privacy of medical records, for the prescription drug registry … to remain as a health care tool and not a law enforcement investigation tool,” said Lippert, pointing out that investigators are already able to obtain records directly from pharmacies.
Last month, Gov. Peter Shumlin said that he will push again to allow limited database access to investigators, as he did last year without success. In the past, advocacy groups like the ACLU-VT have argued that police should first obtain search warrants before accessing the registry, to protect individual privacy.
In the broader context, Lippert sees increased abuse of prescribed and non-prescribed opiates as one of his committee’s key concerns. He’d like to consider harsher punishments for criminal drug traffickers, alongside increased resources for treating and preventing opiate addiction.
On gun control legislation, which will likely start in the Judiciary committees, neither Lippert or Sears would take a position on supporting an automatic weapons ban in principle. Both said that an outright ban is a simplistic solution to a complex problem, which wouldn’t adequately deal with the role of mental illness in violent episodes.
After broad agreement on the importance of curbing drug abuse, the two longtime chairs have fairly distinct interests.
Sears will entertain legislation on public records reform related to criminal investigative records, and wants to review the increasing detention of nonviolent offenders, and how bills are vetted for constitutional weaknesses during the legislative process.
Lippert expects to see legislation on marijuana decriminalization and death with dignity, if the latter first emerges from a Senate committee. Both topics have been prioritized by the Shumlin administration, with interest in marijuana’s legal status also sparked by successful legalization referendums in Burlington, Washington and Colorado.
Attorney General Bill Sorrell supports the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, but also wants the Legislature to “take a hard look at issues related to driving while under the influence of pot.” Sorrell plans to monitor the legalization experiment in Colorado and Washington, focusing on the federal government’s response in those two states to legal conflicts.
On public records reform, Sears has invited input from stakeholders like the ACLU-VT and Sorrell. In a written reply on Dec. 20, Sorrell proposes that investigative records into potential police misconduct become open to the public, to address longstanding questions about bias in cases where police investigate the alleged misconduct of colleagues.
Sears’ initial view is that Vermont should move towards the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) standard on access to criminal files, which permits public access unless there is a reasonable belief that disclosure could harm someone.
According to Sorrell, state prosecutors need to obtain a court order prohibiting disclosure in specific cases under the federal standard, a burden he views as an unnecessary strain on the state’s legal resources.
Many of these topics, including marijuana decriminalization, public records access, and the attorney general’s defense of state legislation in federal courts, because of constitutional questions, were subjects of debate during a fierce August Democratic primary, which Sorrell won narrowly.
