Editor’s note: This article by Maggie B. Cassidy was published in the Brattleboro Reformer on March 31, 2017.
[B]RATTLEBORO — Karen Carroll, who is awaiting confirmation as the newest justice on the Vermont Supreme Court, has been interested in the justice system since she was a small child living in the Northeast Kingdom.
“I was born in Newport, way up on the border, and I lived in several towns in the Northeast Kingdom until second grade, when we moved to Proctor,” she said in a recent interview in her Windham Superior Court chambers. “My father was a Vermont state trooper and he was transferred to Rutland.”
Her parents still live in Proctor. Law enforcement ran in the family.
“I was always interested in the criminal-justice system, mostly because of my father being a state trooper,” she explained. “My grandfather and great-grandfather were chiefs of police in Burlington. I remember as a child the phone would ring in the middle of the night for my dad, and I would get out of bed and go out and listen to him and then ask him what was going on. Sometimes he would tell me, sometimes he wouldn’t.”
She considered applying to the FBI, but she had met her future husband, who was a year behind her in law school.
“If I moved away, and got sent somewhere to work, I worried about the possible effect on our relationship, so I stayed local,” she said. This year they will mark their 27th anniversary.
Knowing that she wanted to be involved with the criminal-justice system, she joined the Windham County State’s Attorney’s office, where she was a prosecutor for six-and-a-half years before going to the Attorney General’s office for six-and-a-half years more.
“I was the prosecutor for the Southern Vermont Drug Task force,” she recalled. “I basically worked out of my home and then went to court in the four southern counties [Windham, Windsor, Bennington and Rutland]. And then in 2000 I was appointed judge.”
While Vermont probate judges are elected, Vermont Superior Court judges are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Vermont Senate, and the process is the same for the Vermont Supreme Court. When an opening is announced, interested candidates send their names — “and a 21-page questionnaire,” Carroll noted — to the Judicial Nominating Board, which has members from the Vermont House and Senate, the Vermont Bar Association, and the public. The Judicial Nominating Board then sends the names of “well-qualified” candidates to the governor, who must nominate from those names, and then the Senate votes on the candidate.
Reflecting on her career as a judge in Superior Court, Carroll said the most rewarding work was with the Driving Under the Influence Treatment docket in Windsor.
“That court is a treatment court for repeat DUI offenders,” she explained. “It started in 2014. I was the first judge to preside in that court, and I was there through June of 2015. These are courts where the goal is treatment. There’s a team, including a judge, that works with the defendants, and helps to guide them through a process of making amends to the community, but also participating in significant treatment.
“What’s different about a treatment court is that every two weeks I held a session where all the participants came before me and talked about their successes and failures in the last two weeks,” she continued. “They all were present, and they would get called up one by one in front of the others to talk about things they’d done right and where they’d slipped. The accountability to their peers is a real motivating factor for participants.
“I so loved working on that court because it was the only real chance I’d had in my career as a judge to work with people on such an intimate level,” she said. “I feel like I learned so much about people’s struggles, their difficulties with access to treatment, and the stigma that they carry around with them. Right now the docket is heavy with juvenile cases, and I’m seeing a lot of the same thing — people struggling with substance abuse, trying to access treatment, doing well and sometimes relapsing. So although it’s not a treatment-court model, I certainly learned a lot about these issues.”
Carroll noted her admiration for Judge David Suntag, now retired.
“He really thought outside the box,” she said. “He was the first judge in the state to let jurors ask questions during trials, and also he was one of the first judges to go back and speak to jurors after trials and answer questions they had about the process. He did a lot, particularly in working with juries, making it a satisfying experience. His ideas have been taken on in every county in the state.” She said that while she feels the weight of her judicial decisions, she has been able to accommodate it.
“I’m very lucky because I don’t tend to agonize over things,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t give everything the consideration it deserves, but I try to make a decision and move on, because I don’t think you could do this job every day if you held on to things. But I will say that one of the really difficult decisions you make as a judge is sentencing, because you’re balancing the circumstances that a particular person is in against societal demands and victims’ rights.”
Another challenge is simply keeping up with the work. Judges must not only preside over court, but also read background material for their cases — and then write up their decisions.
“I don’t know if people understand that if I sit on a three-day hearing, I then have to write an opinion which can be very lengthy and sometimes takes up to two days to write,” she noted. “We don’t get any break in the action of the court to do that, so I do a lot of that on my own time.”
As the five-member Supreme Court is an appellate court, her work there will be very different.
“They’re not holding trials,” Carroll explained. “They’re reviewing decisions by judges to determine if they were correct or not, without hearing evidence. There are several ways it can happen: some cases require five justices to hear the appeal and rule, and in some cases it can be as few as three.
“Oftentimes it’s the choice of the parties, but it can also be the court’s decision based on the nature of the case. There are a very few cases where there’s an appeal to just one judge — often about bail, for the sake of efficiency.”
Carroll looks forward to writing decisions.
“That’s one part of the job, and that part is appealing, because even though I haven’t had a lot of time to do it, I love writing,” she said. “The other part is that the Supreme Court in Vermont oversees the trial courts — developing policy, working on budget requests, and just managing the overall function of the trial courts.”
Heading into the confirmation process, Carroll recognized the role her husband and children have played in her career.
“It comes to mind that when I was appointed as a judge and took the bench, my kids were 1, 4, and 6, and my first assignment was in Bennington — and I live in Vernon,” she said. “So my family, particularly my husband, has been such a support to me in helping me be where I am at this point.”