Orleans County Superior criminal court has begun scheduling some jury trials for the first time since the pandemic began.
The court plans to hold trials in Lamoille and Caledonia counties for Orleans county defendants who have been held in jail while awaiting trial. Trials will alternate between the two locations each month.
The first jury selection is scheduled for Nov. 8 at the Lamoille County courthouse in Hyde Park, and trials are scheduled to begin the following day.
The Orleans courthouse in Newport has been closed for over a year while court officials awaited an engineer’s assessment of whether the building’s HVAC system could function well enough in the Covid-19 era. In August, the report found the HVAC system was satisfactory, as long as certain adjustments were made in court proceedings.
However, Chief Superior Judge Brian Grearson previously told VTDigger that the adjustments required by the engineer’s report would not work in practice, as they could tip off juries as to which defendants had been held in custody before trial.
Attorneys representing both the prosecution and the defense have been asking the court for months to resume criminal trials. But Orleans State’s Attorney Jennifer Barrett and several defense attorneys in the Northeast Kingdom have concerns about the current proposed solution.
“In one fell swoop, this business decision to outsource jury trials effectively silences the voice of Orleans County and divests defendants of their constitutional rights,” wrote Newport-based defense attorney Gertrude Miller in an email to VTDigger.
Defense attorney David Sleigh said that, because the court has scheduled trials only for incarcerated Orleans defendants, some jurors will automatically know the defendant’s pretrial status, “and thus they will actually exacerbate the prejudice they claim they’re trying to avoid.”
In an interview, Grearson said this isn’t necessarily the case. While the court is scheduling only trials for in-custody defendants now, that could change as trials pick up and the case schedule shuffles around.
Grearson said the state’s Department of Buildings and General Services is looking for alternative locations in Orleans County, but has not yet identified a site.
He said the timeline to resume jury trials in Orleans county has been complicated by the area’s lower rates of vaccination and higher infection rates, compared to other parts of the state.
“I don’t want anybody to have to travel out of county, but we need to start addressing these cases,” Grearson said. “Even if we’re looking at alternative sites, and [Buildings and General Services] is looking at those alternative sites, I don’t know how long that is going to take. I don’t think we can afford to wait, and so this is the option now. If [through] working with the attorneys, we can find a way to try these cases in Orleans County, then that’s what we ought to be working towards.”
For any cases that result in a guilty verdict, the change of venue will likely come up in an appeal, said Amy Davis, a defense attorney based in St. Johnsbury. However, Davis is concerned higher courts will dismiss the impacts of trial location, since it’s the judicial system that made the choice to relocate.
“I don’t have any faith that once appealed, that the Vermont Supreme Court is going to say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right, this is completely unconstitutional,’ when they’re the ones who wrote it,” Davis said.
Barrett said she has concerns that these new locations, each about a 45-minute drive from the Orleans court, will make it more difficult for witnesses and victims to show up at trial, as they’d need to take more time off work or secure additional child care. Davis agreed.
“We have real significant transportation barriers in this area,” Davis said. If this was in Burlington or Chittenden county, you probably wouldn’t have the same issues, probably not the same issues in Washington county. But it’s a real problem in the Kingdom.”
