[W]hen Carl King met the lieutenant governor this summer to talk about veterans’ mental health, he thought it’d be a big break for his Newport nonprofit, Camp Care USA.
Then officials learned the 47-year-old had an active criminal case, King said. They distanced themselves from him and his project to aid vets, he said, leaving him in a rut.
He believes that wouldn’t have happened had his misdemeanor criminal threatening charge — which he denies — been better handled by Jill Jourdan, the state’s primary public defense contractor in Orleans County, who represented King for nine months after his May 2018 arrest.
“She doesn’t call. She doesn’t answer. You leave a message, it falls on deaf ears,” King said.
He thinks one reason the case dragged on is because Jourdan is overburdened as the lone lawyer handling criminal cases at her firm, Northeast Kingdom Law.
Jourdan called King’s claims “patently untrue” and said court backlog, not her own actions, delayed his case. But she does acknowledge that she’s reaching a precarious point with her workload and lack of staff — and that if something doesn’t change soon, defendants in the Northeast Kingdom could be harmed.
“In about another year or year and a half, if we continue on the same trajectory, I think it’s going to reach really serious proportions,” Jourdan said. “I think people’s constitutional rights are going to be seriously compromised.”
She is one of three individual public defenders who, as of Aug. 4 data, handled nearly two-thirds of the 1,102 active criminal cases in the Northeast Kingdom. Jourdan’s firm was responsible for the majority of those cases.
For every 1.5 full-time defense attorneys in the Northeast Kingdom, there are five prosecutors, according to several lawyers who practice in the region.
Those in legal circles say there has been a longstanding lack of new lawyers interested in public defense in the rural region, and recent turnover in Jourdan’s firm has made the situation increasingly fragile.
She said she has needed to replace four attorneys in the last year and a half. In February, her firm gave up coverage of Essex County because resources had been spread so thin.
Defender General Matthew Valerio, who’s in charge of making sure Vermonters have legal representation when facing criminal charges, believes there is little his office can do to address the problem.
“It is impossible to attract lawyers to the NEK at almost any cost,” Valerio wrote to a Caledonia County judge earlier this year, in an email obtained by VTDigger. “They all want to be in Burlington or Montpelier. And they want to be prosecutors, not defenders.”
The turnover, and struggle to find new lawyers, has left Jourdan’s clients anxious and confused. In certain cases, staffing issues slowed down their progress through the judicial system.
Some lawyers say that delaying cases hurts defendants’ right to a speedy trial and impacts how well witnesses will remember key events. Staff shortages also mean defenders are less likely to spend time with individual clients. Gaps between prosecutor and defender staffs could contribute to the problem, attorneys say.
“Over in Caledonia County right now, there are five prosectuors and there’s basically … one and a half defense attorneys,” said Laura Wilson, the primary public defense contractor in Essex County. “And that’s kind of a matter of being outgunned.”
A struggle to hire
Vermont created state public defense offices in 1972, following a federal Supreme Court decision establishing the right to legal counsel. Six years later, state legislators decided to allow the state to contract for public defense services, too, beginning with four offices covering five counties.
Lawmakers wanted to keep experienced lawyers within the public defense system while giving them the chance to also cover private cases, Valerio said. Otherwise, he said, attorneys might have left public work and likely been replaced with rookies.
Today, seven counties are served by contract offices, according to the defender general’s website, including the Kingdom’s. State employees provided public defense in the region until the ‘90s.
There are two primary public defense contractors in the Kingdom: Jourdan’s, in Caledonia and Orleans; and Wilson’s firm, Young & Wilson, in Essex.
They handle the majority of criminal cases in the region, with the remainder represented by private attorneys or assigned to state-designated lawyers when conflicts of interest arise (such as when a defendant is a witness in another case assigned to an attorney). The defender general also has a unit dedicated exclusively to serious felony cases, such as murder, which aren’t touched by the primary contractors.
Jourdan is the sole attorney handling criminal cases in her Orleans County office. According to data from the Vermont judiciary, as of Aug. 4, she had 422 of the total 651 active criminal cases in the county, or 65%.
Attorney Alan Franklin works in Caledonia for Jourdan’s firm. He handled 234 out of 372 active criminal cases in that county as of Aug. 4, according to state data, or 63%.
Laura Wilson — of Young & Wilson — is the only attorney in her firm handling criminal cases in Essex. Her 52 active cases as of Aug. 4 made up 66% of the total in Essex, the data shows.
Add all those figures up, and the trio represented 64% of the active criminal cases across the three counties.
The workload is so heavy that Jourdan has had to take more vacation time than she otherwise would to recoup, she said. She said she typically works more than a standard, 40-hour week.
Jourdan scheduled 60 vacation days for 2019, excluding weekends, according to a letter sent to the courts at the end of December. “It’s so I don’t hurt my body because of the workload,” she said.
That, in turn, has meant she’s been unavailable with no backup — such as for pretrial conferences in March and July, records show.
Jourdan has also struggled to hire and retain more lawyers.
When she’s able to bring on new lawyers, they usually don’t want to stay in the area for long, she said. The ones she can hire often have little experience, which hurts how well defendants can be represented.
“It’s not like a greeter at Walmart, where you can just shove somebody in there and they’re good to go,” Jourdan said.
She traced the recent problems to the deaths of Gilbert Power and Doug Willey, in 2007 and 2015, who ran the firm Willey & Power and for years held the contract for the Northeast Kingdom counties. Jourdan had worked for their firm before launching her own after Willey’s death.
“When that happened, it became the perfect storm,” she said. “And my life has not been the same since then.”
Her hiring and retention problem is one facet of a wider struggle in the Kingdom to attract new faces.
The three county region ranks as among the least populous in the state, and each has seen more and more people leave in recent years: Between two census data periods (2006-10 and 2012-16), Orleans experienced a 0.7% population loss, Caledonia a 1.1% loss and Essex a 2.9% loss, the second-highest of any county in Vermont.
People who live in the Kingdom are spread across a vast area, and they have the lowest median household incomes in Vermont, according to the Vermont State Data Center. Nighttime entertainment is scarce, the median age is higher than the state average (which is among the highest in America) and the three counties have some of the worst access to high-speed internet in the state.
All that combined makes new lawyers leery of moving to the region.
“If you’re a lawyer between the age of 25 and 30, you are much more attracted to going to Burlington and Montpelier than you are going to Newport or St. Johnsbury,” Valerio said.
Even if young lawyers wanted to go to the Kingdom, he said, they’d be less-inclined to go into public defense work, particularly because it’s contract employment. Lawyers don’t receive benefits like staff public defenders or state’s attorneys.
Valerio said no one in his office knows why contract offices began in the Kingdom counties.
“Likely it was like the earlier contract firms, an opportunity to set up a private firm and still do public defense work, because that is what happened on its face, and the model worked well in the other counties for a number of years,” he said.
In Jourdan’s and Varlerio’s view, there are also relatively few attorneys these days who want to both go to court and defend people accused of crimes.
“So you’re taking from an already small pool, from a depressed area where nobody wants to come, and looking for people to come work,” Jourdan said. “That’s what that comes down to.”
In February, the Defender General’s Office tried a solution: amending its contract with Northeast Kingdom Law to give the firm an additional $213,547, bringing its total to nearly $2.3 million across four years, state records show.
The hope was that an increased budget would mean better pay for prospective attorneys. It hasn’t worked, at least in Valerio’s eyes. “If there’s not the attraction to go up there, it doesn’t matter how much money (is offered),” he said.
The bigger budget did help Jourdan’s firm snag another attorney for Orleans County this spring, she said. But the lawyer was licensed in New York, and the process to waive her into the Vermont bar dragged on, Jourdan said. The lawyer is now in a character- and fitness-evaluation stage, which could take months to complete, Jourdan said.
Outgunned? Prosecutors disagree
Jourdan and her peers believe there is a dangerous imbalance between their staffs and those of prosecutors. And at least one prosecutor, Essex County State’s Attorney Vincent Illuzzi, agrees.
Illuzzi said he is often in court in Caledonia County — because there is only a judge in Essex on a part-time basis — and has been struck by the sight of public defender Alan Franklin alone on one side of the courtroom and several state’s attorneys on the opposite side.
“That right there should be the picture that tells you how outgunned he is — how overwhelming it can seem to have that many cases being handled by (five) full-time prosecutors, as compared to one public defender,” Illuzzi said.
“So it’s a very daunting task that he has, to try to manage the clients, the cases, meet court deadlines. I’m not sure that leads to confidence in the criminal justice system,” Illuzzi continued.
It’s nearly the same in Orleans County, he said, where Jourdan is outnumbered 4-to-1 by prosecutors.
Valerio, in the email obtained by VTDigger, put it simply: “We do not have the equivalent of law enforcement.”
He added: “I have thrown a lot more money at Jill lately, but there is still a huge personnel cost disparity.”
That’s because, he told VTDigger, administrations and lawmakers over time haven’t provided contract defenders with the same funds given to state employees. “The result has been that payments to contractors slipped so that currently there is a much greater difference in the cost of a staff office compared to what contract offices are now paid,” he said.
Starting off, staff public defenders and deputy state’s attorneys both make around $53,000, according to state pay plans for the first half of 2019. Jourdan said she has historically started new hires at her firm at about $10,000 less than their state counterparts.
Caledonia County State’s Attorney Lisa Warren said she understands how burdensome public defenders’ workload is. And she acknowledged that state benefits might make her and other prosecutors’ offices more attractive destinations than a contract office.
She hesitates, though, to call Northeast Kingdom Law outgunned. The reason: “They don’t get assigned in all cases.”
Unlike the public defense contractor, her office is responsible for essentially every criminal case in the county, she said, and she has had her own challenges in finding new attorneys to come aboard.
Still, Warren said, “I do think that they need maybe another associate in their office.”
Orleans County State’s Attorney Jennifer Barrett has a similar stance about the idea that Northeast Kingdom Law is outgunned.
“Any statement that the prosecution in Orleans County has a larger pool of resources than the public defenders is wholly inaccurate, misleading, and not supported by facts or available data,” Barrett said in an emailed statement, highlighting the same points made by Warren.
Delays are daunting for defendants
What’s been the impact on defendants?
Carl King, the Newport man accused of criminal threatening, is embarrassed and angry about the prolonging of his case.
“People think I’m something I’m not,” he said. “The longer it’s out in town, it gets rooted in.”
He said that when people talk about working with his nonprofit, others ask, “Do you hear about the guy who’s running it?”
Meanwhile, turnover in Jourdan’s office has caused anxiety for clients used to dealing with one attorney.
“They get scared,” she said.
When one attorney, Bridget Grace, left the firm’s St. Johnsbury office in May, “it was a real shock and unnerving for people,” Jourdan said.
Grace, now a deputy state’s attorney in Washington County, said she left primarily because she lives in Washington County, and driving to the Northeast Kingdom every day for three years had become a burden.
She saw turnover during her years at the firm before becoming part of it herself.
She said she had originally been hired to manage juvenile cases in Caledonia and adult criminal cases in Essex.
But then she switched to Caledonia criminal cases after an attorney’s departure around the start of last year. Another attorney came aboard to fill Grace’s previous role in Essex, but that attorney left last September to join the Caledonia County State’s Attorney’s Office.
How did Grace’s departure contribute to clients’ unease?
“It was something I thought about as I was leaving, and I ultimately had to make a decision that was best for me and my family,” she said. “But there’s certain people that I miss, and I feel bad for stepping out while their case was still pending.”
In Orleans County, Jourdan said, her staffing issues contribute to docket backlog.
She said that her dozens of vacation days have slowed cases down, but she doesn’t believe many of them would have moved forward anyway because the court is backed up.
“The short answer is, yes, all those people who would’ve been on, you’re right, certainly, technically, are going to (be delayed),” she said.
But more serious cases, and those in which defendants have been held in jail for long periods of time, are prioritized on court dockets, so her cases likely would not have gotten trial dates, she said.
Barrett, in her statement, said her office has been patient with staffing issues at Jourdan’s firm over the last few years.
“However the staffing issues in conjunction with the unavailability of attorneys from NEK Law due to vacation schedules has certainly contributed to a delay for a number of cases in Orleans County in 2019,” she said.
Delays in cases do more than cause uncertainty for both defendants and victims, Illuzzi said.
Attorney unavailability and court backlog make it difficult to guarantee a defendant’s right to a speedy trial, he said. And even when proceedings start moving, the longer the wait, the more risk for witnesses’ memories to fade.
Shallow resources and attorneys coming and going also endanger how prepared a defense can be, Illuzzi said, which could mean a case is represented so poorly that it can get lodged in appeals later on.
“If the defense is unable to adequately prepare, then it simply leads to unhappy clients,” he said.
King counts as one of them, and he doesn’t buy Jourdan’s explanation about court backlog.
“If your cases, or ducks, are in a row and presented properly, you should know … to prosecute these cases or defend these cases in an adequate amount of time,” he said.
Jourdan filed a motion with the court on Feb. 5 to stop representing King because “there has been a complete breakdown in attorney client communication.”
“He was very verbally abusive to my staff on the phone, many times, and then he was to me,” she said.
King said that, at one point, he did get angry on the phone with Jourdan’s office.
“I was so frustrated because they weren’t returning phone calls,” he said.
After that, King’s case bounced between three other lawyers, who all said they couldn’t represent him because of conflicts of interest, court records show.
That continued until April, when his case was assigned to Brice Simon, one of the defender general’s conflict counsel attorneys. His case hasn’t moved forward since, King said.
He believes his situation could have been avoided during the nine months Jourdan represented him, had she not been overburdened.
“If you’re too busy gaining other cases and not paying attention to the cases you’ve already got, you’re being ineffective,” he said.
How to bring in more lawyers?
Along with the boost to Northeast Kingdom Law’s contract, Valerio said he has tried to nudge applicants away from Chittenden and Washington counties and toward the Kingdom.
“Advertising alone in the Northeast Kingdom, we might not even get applications,” he said, adding, “We’re doing everything we can to kind of force people up there.”
Illuzzi, who outside of court lobbies for the Vermont State Employees Association, said Valerio’s office should continue trying to get more resources for its attorneys in the Kingdom.
“I think the Defender General’s Office has to seek and obtain from the General Assembly comparable resources to what the state’s attorneys have,” Illuzzi said. “So you either pay them wages and benefits equivalent to what the state’s attorneys have, or you create and establish state-paid public defender offices as it used to be in St. Johnsbury and Newport.”
Grace, emphasizing it was not the main reason she left, said state benefits were “certainly nice.”
But she had another idea for how to pitch the Northeast Kingdom to prospective attorneys: plenty of courtroom experience.
“That’s one of the places where you’re going to be able to get it,” she said. “I don’t know if people coming out of law school realize.”
She lamented the state of things in the Kingdom, calling it a beautiful area.
“It can be a really great place,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that more people don’t want to practice up there.”
