A use-of-force expert disputes that he has changed his view of a case he reviewed despite Attorney General TJ Donovan’s assertion a day earlier that a “more equivocal” opinion from that expert prompted him to revive the matter and prosecute an officer for assault.
“I never said it was reasonable, and I never said it was unreasonable,” Drew Bloom, director of administration for the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, said Wednesday of his review of the more than 2-year-old incident involving Joel Daugreilh, a former St. Albans police corporal.
“I said that I’m having a really hard time giving an opinion on this,” Bloom added, “and it’s a sketchy use of force and I just can’t give a solid opinion either way based on these facts.”
Donovan this week reversed an earlier decision from two years ago to not prosecute Daugreilh and brought a simple assault charge against him for the incident that took place inside the St. Albans police station. According to court filings submitted this week, Daugreilh pepper-sprayed Nathan Willey, then 18, as he was handcuffed and in a holding cell inside the station.
Daugreilh, who has since resigned from the department, pleaded not guilty to the charge Tuesday during an arraignment in St. Albans criminal court.
The attorney general said Tuesday he based his reversal on “new information,” including a “more equivocal” view of the case from Bloom in December 2019 than Bloom had in May 2018, when Donovan said he learned that expert had found the officer’s actions reasonable.
“I was always troubled by this case, it never sat well with me, I was surprised that the conclusion was that it was a reasonable use of force,” Donovan said Tuesday of the expert’s opinion. “Obviously, that causes us some trouble prosecuting the matter.”
Donovan said that a defense attorney could use the information from Bloom that it was a reasonable use of force in defending against a charge.
According to court filings, Bloom met Evan Meenan, now a former assistant attorney general, in May 2018 to talk about the case. At that point, Bloom said he told Meenan he couldn’t decide one way or another whether the officer’s use of pepper-spray was justified.
“I said to him that my recommendation maybe is they may want to convene a grand jury and let a grand jury hear all the evidence and determine if they want to have charges filed,” Bloom said Wednesday.
“I said that if the officer was trying to stop the person from damaging property and potentially hurting himself like he said he was, and only he would know that, then there is a potential that that OC (Oleoresin Capsicum spray) was not unreasonable,” Bloom added. “If it was done purely as a punitive measure then of course that’s excessive. That’s not OK and then he should be charged.”
Bloom said he reviewed records provided to him from the Attorney General’s Office related to the case as well as videos from the incident, taken from the officer’s body cam and cameras inside the station.
He said at that time he told Meenan he was willing to write up a report about his mixed opinion, but Meenan told him that it wasn’t necessary.
Then, he said, more than a year later in December 2019 he heard back from the Attorney General’s Office about the case.
“When I talked to TJ and a couple of his other attorneys on the phone back several months ago, I expressed the same thing,” Bloom said Wednesday. “I said, ‘You know, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I just can’t offer you a solid opinion on this case.’”
Bloom did say he found the officer was too close to the inmate when he sprayed him.
“The manner in which the OC spray was sprayed, I said, was too close,” he said. “I’ll stand by that all day long, that doesn’t mean that use of it was potentially excessive. Again, I wasn’t able to give a solid opinion on it either way.”
Detective Sgt. Karl Gardner of the Vermont State Police, who investigated the case, wrote in an affidavit filed in court this week that as part of his probe he reviewed handwritten notes from that May 2018 conversation between Meenan and Bloom.
“During the conversation,” the affidavit stated, “Bloom told Meenan initially he couldn’t formulate an opinion on ‘reasonable or unreasonable,’ and later stated it was ‘reasonable’ because he felt that Willey was ‘active resistance.’”
Bloom, speaking Wednesday, disputes ever concluding that the use of force was reasonable.
“I don’t want to create a controversy over this, it’s the last thing I need,” Bloom said before adding, “I never said that use of force was reasonable.”
Donovan reopened the case after another St. Albans officer was charged in late 2019 with striking a handcuffed woman in a holding cell at the station. Shortly after that Vermont Public Radio submitted a public records request seeking information about the earlier use-of-force cases investigated by the Attorney General’s Office, including the one from 2017 involving Daugreilh.
The attorney general said Tuesday that since the 2019 case against another St. Albans police officer involved “similar” conduct as the one with Daugreilh, it put that earlier case back on his “radar.” And as the public records request was pending, Donovan added, he learned “new information” about that earlier probe.
“A member of my team reached out during the time of the processing of the public records request and talked to Drew Bloom,” Donovan said Tuesday. He added that he learned this time that Bloom was “more equivocal” in his view of the case.
“It was not, I would say, as firm as the first opinion was represented to me,” Donovan said Tuesday.
Bloom did say Wednesday he wished now that he had written a report and submitted it to Meenan back in May 2018 so what he said he determined then would have been in writing.
In response Wednesday afternoon to a request to speak to Donovan, Charity Clark, the attorney general’s chief of staff, stated in an email that as the matter is an ongoing criminal case “we won’t be providing further comment.”
Clark did provide written responses to questions on Wednesday afternoon.
The response stated that if not for the expert opinion the attorney general “would likely” have charged Daugreilh in May 2018.
The response added that the assistant attorney general, identified in court filings as Meenan, spoke to Bloom at that time and had “contemporaneous notes” that indicated Bloom’s conclusion at the time was it had been a “reasonable” use of force.
In addition, the response stated, two other assistant attorneys general “represented” to Donovan and Deputy Attorney General Joshua Diamond that Bloom had determined the use of force to be reasonable.
“The original declination of the charge was based in large part on these representations of Mr. Bloom’s conclusion,” the response stated. “In December 2019, it was represented to Deputy Diamond that Mr. Bloom’s opinion was not as it had previously been memorialized in the notes or represented.”
According to the response provided Wednesday by the Attorney General’s Office, two other assistant attorneys general, now no longer in the office, took over the probe after Meenan left the office a short time after his conversation with Bloom in May 2018.
Those two assistant attorneys general were Adam Korn and Bram Kranichfeld, then head of the office’s criminal division, according to the response.
Meenan, reached Wednesday, confirmed that he left the Attorney General’s Office in June 2018, and he had been interim chief of the criminal division. He said when he was in that position, he was assigned to review the use of force case and reassigned that review to Korn. Then Kranichfeld was hired as the full-time chief of the criminal division when Meenan said he stepped down from the post.
“At that point I was no longer directly involved in the review,” Meenan said. “So Attorney General Donovan would have been responsible for making any charging decisions after considering any advice that Bram and Adam had given to him.”
Asked about his May 2018 conversation with Bloom, Meenan said he couldn’t comment since the case is an ongoing criminal matter.
“It’s been more than two years since I had any involvement in the matter and I no longer have access to my notes to help refresh my recollection,” he added. “At this point if I were to try to summarize a conversation from 2018 I would risk mischaracterizing that.”
Meenan said when he left the Attorney General’s Office he took a job as an attorney at the Natural Resources Board.
Bloom on Wednesday denied that his opinion changed from his earlier review of the case.
“I certainly didn’t change my mind, there was nothing different,” Bloom said. “I gave them the exact same information.”
Donovan eventually obtained another opinion from a second use-of-force expert, Steve Ijames, a longtime officer in Springfield, Missouri. Ijames has worked around the country with police agencies on use-of-force issues.
Ijames, according to court filings, recently found the use of force unreasonable, prompting the filing of the criminal charge against the officer this week.
