[C]ourt records discussing the mental health of a woman alleged to have killed four people in central Vermont last month should not have been disclosed to the public, an audit by the judiciary found.
The court launched the inquiry after VTDigger and Vermont media outlets published a November 2010 document that was part of an evaluation of shooting suspect Jody Herring’s mental health.
In the documents, obtained from Washington County Family Court, the doctor refers to Herring’s “underlying bipolar disorder.”
An inquiry by the court found that the documents “should have been identified as confidential and were not, therefore the documents were inadvertently provided to the media during public inspection of the file,” Linda Richard, director of planning and court services, wrote in a letter to Herring’s attorney, David Sleigh, last week.
An audit of the court file from which the document was obtained concluded that there was no record of the psychiatric review having been entered into the file.
How and when the letter from the doctor and “the documents regarding the Psychiatric Review Technique came to be in this case file continues to be a mystery,” concluded a file audit report dated Aug. 21.
Sleigh says that the release of the documents represents “gross negligence” on the part of the court system.
“The court as an institution has as its prime mission providing fair adjudication of people who are accused of crimes. That’s job No. 1 for them,” Sleigh said in an interview Wednesday.
“This was a serious lapse in their responsibility,” he said, noting that in his view the release of the document could impact Herring’s access to a fair trial.
Court Administrator Patricia Gabel was unavailable to comment on the results of the inquiry.
Chief Superior Judge Brian Grearson said by email last week that the judiciary branch views “this as an isolated incident of the inadvertent disclosure of a confidential document to a member of the press.”
“The courts have procedures for the filing and retention of confidential documents and that procedure was not followed in this instance,” Grearson wrote. “As such, its subsequent disclosure does not call for a wider review of those procedures.”
But Sleigh said that he experiences mistakes within the court system with some regularity. He sees the need for a system that is more reliable. The judiciary has “completely failed,” he said, to use 21st technology to manage cases.
“They’ve just not been a very well-managed institution for quite some time now,” he said.
Sara Puls, an attorney in the juvenile division of the Defender General’s Office, said that in her experience, errors in court files are common.
“We’re definitely working in an imperfect system,” Puls said. “Everyone is doing the best they can with the time they have. These things happen.”
However, Dickson Corbett, a deputy state’s attorney in Orange County, said that in his experience, mistakes are rare.
“I basically haven’t heard about this before,” he said Friday.
Corbett said that court files pass through many different hands — from the judge to the clerks. In that system, “it would be impossible to think that more mistakes never happen,” he said.
Corbett says that in his experience in the Orange County State’s Attorney’s Office and the court system, filing errors are uncommon.
