Wrong-way driver crash
In October, a man driving a pickup truck northbound in the southbound lanes of Interstate 89 in Williston collided head-on with a car, killing all five teenagers inside. The pickup driver, 36-year-old Steven Bourgoin, then allegedly stole a police cruiser that had been called to the accident, first driving away before returning to the scene and slamming into several other vehicles.
Bourgoin survived the crash and was arraigned on five second-degree murder charges from his hospital bed at the University of Vermont Medical Center. A friend of Bourgoin’s said he had post-traumatic stress disorder, other health issues and financial troubles. Late in October, a judge ordered a competency evaluation.
All five teenagers were from central Vermont. Eli Brookens, Mary Harris, Cyrus Zschau and Liam Hale were all juniors at Harwood Union High School in Duxbury. Janie Chase Cozzi, who attended Harwood through middle school, was a sophomore at Kimball Union in New Hampshire. Hundreds in the community gathered to celebrate their lives later in the month.
DMV settles Human Rights Commission case
The Department of Motor Vehicles agreed to change the application procedure for driving credentials in a settlement with a Jordanian man in a Human Rights Commission case.
When Abdul Rababah applied for a driver’s privilege card in 2014, a DMV worker flagged him to federal immigration authorities. The form of identification, the result of 2013 legislation passed with migrant farmworkers in mind, does not require applicants to show proof they are in the United States legally.
As a result of Rababah’s settlement, the DMV agreed to make several changes to the application procedure — including offering a version of the application in Spanish and clarifying that applicants for driver’s privilege card do not need to answer a question about their citizenship.
Emails from 2014 and 2015 show that officials with the DMV were in frequent communication with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the early implementation period of the driver’s privilege cards.
Meanwhile, federal authorities continued their efforts to combat smuggling, human trafficking and other crime along the border with Canada.
Juvenile justice, license suspension and more, but no legal pot
Many, including Gov. Peter Shumlin, thought 2016 could be the year to legalize pot in the Green Mountain State.
The governor put legalization on his agenda for his final year in office in his State of the State address in January. The measure came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January with the support of Chairman Dick Sears, D-Bennington, previously a skeptic on the issue. The Senate voted to approve the measure in February, and it passed to the House.
The bill got a tepid reception in the lower chamber. After weeks of testimony, the House Judiciary Committee passed a hollowed out version of the measure, which cleared the House Ways and Means Committee before terminally stalling in House Appropriations. Two efforts to revive the bill in the Senate failed, and lawmakers left in May with an agreement that the Joint Justice Oversight Committee would continue work on the issue.
Lawmakers changed the driver’s license suspension rules with the goal of making it easier for Vermonters to get back on the road legally after their license is suspended for an unpaid traffic ticket.
A separate measure, which quietly passed through both chambers, changes the way young people are handled in the criminal justice system.
More cases involving teenage offenders will now begin on a family court docket, rather than an adult criminal court docket. The legislation also requires the Department of Corrections to keep inmates under the age of 25 separate from the general population, starting next year.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the school and grade of Janie Chase Cozzi.)
