[A] criminal charge has been dropped by prosecutors against a former Vermont State Police trooper accused of driving a cruiser while under the influence of alcohol and on duty.
A trial last year on the drunken driving charge in the case against Eric Rademacher ended in a hung jury. Last week, Assistant Attorney General Evan Meenan, the prosecutor in the case, submitted a filing in Rutland superior criminal court dismissing the charge.
Meenan wrote in that filing that paperwork provided by Rademacher’s attorney showed that the former trooper had completed residential treatment as well as six months of additional after-care counseling.
“This treatment will hopefully enable [Rademacher] to avoid engaging in behavior like that which led to the charges in this case,” Meenan wrote.
The dismissal of the charge was first reported by Seven Days.
“I’m obviously delighted. This has been a two-year ordeal and we’re happy to have it over with at this point,” David Sleigh, Rademacher’s attorney, said Wednesday.
“Maybe it was just. Do we really want to spend another two days trying a case where not a single witness said that Eric appeared in impaired in any way … and had a .04 test?” Sleigh said of the possible reasoning for the dropping the case. “Maybe it was just a decision that it wasn’t a prudent use of the attorney general’s resources.”
Meenan said dismissing the case was a matter of balancing interests.
“We want to make sure that when cases have merit we take to them to trial when we’re unable to settle them in order to pursue the public interest in just law enforcement, that’s especially true when it comes to a law enforcement officer who’s accused of misconduct,” Meenan said. “That’s why it was important for us to take it to trial.”
Then came the hung jury, and a decision had to be made whether it was worth having a retrial.
“When we took a look at the work that Mr. Rademacher had done to try and address some of the underlying issues that gave rise to the criminal charges we decided that he made sufficient progress to warrant a decision to dismiss it as opposed to spending additional time and resources retrying it a second time,” Meenan said.
The dismissal filing brings to a close a long-running, heavily litigated case that involved disputed testimony over the back analysis associated with a breath test.
The case dates back to March 2, 2015, when Rademacher was home and called to respond around 4:30 a.m. to a vehicle crash on Route 4 in Killington.
Officers at that scene and at a later fight Rademacher responded to in Shrewsbury reported smelling alcohol on his breath. At about 9:15 a.m. in Shrewsbury, according to a police affidavit, a preliminary roadside breath test on Rademacher revealed a 0.085 percent alcohol level.
Nearly two hours later, at around 11 a.m., an evidentiary breath test on Rademacher at the state police barracks in Rutland Town revealed a 0.04 percent alcohol level, the affidavit stated.
At the time he was called in around 4:30 a.m., a chemist for the state estimated, Rademacher had a 0.13 percent alcohol level, according to an affidavit. An expert for the defense has disputed that calculation, revealing a figure well below the 0.08 legal limit for driving in Vermont.
Rademacher has since resigned from the Vermont State Police.
