More than a week after being cleared for release on furlough, Matthew Morgan remains incarcerated as he tries to line up housing that passes muster with the Vermont Department of Corrections.
At a hearing Friday morning, Morgan’s lawyer, Annie Manhardt — supervising attorney in Vermont’s Prisoners’ Rights Office — said a first residence Morgan submitted to the department “did not wind up working out.” Morgan now has another residence to propose, according to Manhardt.
“In my experience, it can take months for the residence process to play out,” she said at the hearing.
While on furlough last fall, Morgan, 54, was charged with shoplifting a $129 speaker from Walmart. Morgan denied the charge, which was later dismissed by the state with prejudice, meaning it can’t be retried, but not before the Department of Corrections decided Morgan should spend four years in prison following the alleged violation.
The department determined the severity of the furlough interrupt — four years — using guidelines that considered the fact that the later-disproven violation was Morgan’s fourth, department officials have said.
Seeking release from prison, Morgan sued the department.
In an interview last week, he said his doctor provided a statement confirming that he had been at a medical appointment at the time of the crime, which led the state to permanently dismiss the case in June. Although court documents show that Morgan’s parole officer informed his corrections caseworker the same day the charges were dropped, Morgan has remained in prison, and is currently lodged at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield.
Two days after VTDigger reported on Morgan’s case, corrections officials decided during a closed-door meeting that Morgan was again eligible for furlough.
In Vermont, home to one of the county’s most dire housing shortages, dozens of Vermonters remain incarcerated past their minimum release date due to an inability to find housing.
As of June 30, the latest date for which numbers are publicly available, 63 people were incarcerated in-state due to a lack of housing.
A previous VTDigger analysis showed that the corrections department’s investment in transitional housing has helped to cut that number, but also pointed to some aspects of the data that make it difficult to interpret.
Vermonters held in prisons due to a lack of housing have been a focus of Vermont’s ACLU, according to Falko Schilling, the organization’s advocacy director.
“Anytime we see someone who’s incarcerated due to lack of adequate housing in the community, that’s a systemic failure,” he said, and the state needs more housing to combat the problem. “We should not be using prison as a means to provide housing for people.”
As for the process by which the Department of Corrections approves housing for people eligible for release, Schilling said the ACLU had heard from people about “inconsistency” regarding what housing arrangements get approved.
As he waits in prison, Morgan is still pursuing his lawsuit against the corrections department.
On Friday, Vermont Superior Court Judge Dickson Corbett set a hearing regarding the merits of Morgan’s case for Sept. 12.
Lauri Fisher, an attorney for the department, argued on Friday that Morgan’s lawsuit seeking release was meritless because he should have appealed the furlough violation that triggered his four-year prison sentence.
According to Fisher, Morgan should have appealed his furlough violation through “Rule 74,” a rule governing appeals of furlough violations. Morgan’s request for release “should have fallen under Rule 74,” Fisher said.
But Morgan has argued that his furlough violation did not fall under the violations eligible for appeal under Rule 74.
State statute indicates that a person can appeal a furlough interrupt of longer than 90 days through Rule 74 if the alleged violation is a “technical violation.” The statute goes on to describe a technical violation as one that “does not constitute a new crime.”
Morgan’s alleged violation — receiving a criminal charge for shoplifting — involved an alleged “new crime.”
