Ian Sullivan’s office had its work cut out for it this year, and then some.
Several prosecutors in the Rutland County state’s attorney’s office had more than 300 court cases on their plates at a given time — hardly a reasonable workload, he said. But there was only so much Sullivan could do. The county faces a backlog of about 1,000 open cases, he said, many of which have inched through the courts for years.
Similar backlogs have burdened courtrooms in every Vermont county since long before Covid-19 was first detected in the state, but the pandemic and its ensuing lockdowns exacerbated the issue as jury trials were shut down completely for more than a year.
In the meantime, the courts’ lists of pending cases kept growing. And while officials and lawmakers say that headway is being made — Sullivan’s office had some 1,700 cases in its backlog earlier this year — they agree that progress isn’t happening quickly enough.
“We were barely treading water during the ‘normal times’ before Covid,” said Matthew Valerio, Vermont’s defender general. “You add thousands of cases to that, and you’ve got a problem that’s going to take a number of years to resolve.”
As of this week, there were about 14,500 total pending cases statewide that have not been resolved within the recommended time frame, according to Teri Corsones, Vermont’s court administrator.
Reducing the court backlog will be among the top issues for lawmakers on the House and Senate judiciary committees as the 2024 legislative session gets underway next month. While solutions have proven difficult to come by in the past, lawmakers are slated to take up proposals alongside new funding requests from the judicial branch.
“Everything will come into the conversation — clearly, we need to move cases quicker,” said Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Lawmakers’ focus comes in no small part because they see a nexus between the court backlog and what is set to be a major point of discussion under the golden dome: public safety. A conviction, officials said, is less of a deterrent if there is little chance it will happen in a timely manner — and such delays are unjust to alleged offenders, too.
People accused of crimes are often living under conditions of release as they await trial, if they’re not in custody. That can mean abiding by a curfew, or being barred from traveling outside state lines. The state of limbo can persist for years, officials said.
“Timely dispositions also go a long way toward addressing the public safety concerns that, I think, everybody living in Vermont is hearing about on one level or another,” Sullivan said in an interview Wednesday.
Model standards adopted by the Vermont Judiciary state that misdemeanor cases should be closed within 180 days of the date they are filed, and felony cases should be resolved within a year. But statewide, 53% of all misdemeanor cases, and 36% of felony cases, have exceeded those limits, according to judiciary data. Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, presented the numbers at a pre-session hearing of the House Appropriations Committee early last week.
During the 2019 fiscal year — the last before the pandemic — prosecutors filed about 15,760 criminal cases in Vermont, and about 7,580 were still pending by the end of that year, data shows. But while fewer criminal cases — about 12,500 — were filed in the most recent fiscal year, more than 15,200 cases were left pending at year’s end. That figure includes criminal cases left unresolved from previous years. (The most recent fiscal year spanned from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023).
“They’re doing a lot to whittle those down,” LaLonde said of the judiciary, speaking to the members of the appropriations panel. “But there is a lot of work to be done.”
LaLonde said there is no single reason for the continuing backlog, though he pointed to persistent staffing challenges across the entire judicial system, from judgeships to court support, and county state’s attorney’s offices to private defense law firms.
The judiciary was down five judge positions for most of this year, according to Teri Corsones, Vermont’s court administrator, meaning that some judges had to be pulled off their regular dockets to fill in for cases in other areas. Some judges were also asked to fill in on one of the state’s five benches dedicated to individuals with substance use disorders, called “treatment court dockets,” Corsones said in an interview Thursday. This all exacerbated the backlog of cases in those judge’s home counties, she said.
As of this week, the judiciary has only a single vacant judge position, according to Corsones. Gov. Phil Scott appointed five new superior court judges to vacant seats on the bench last month, and lawmakers earlier this year approved a new “floating” judicial position that Corsones said helps fill in the gaps in southern Vermont counties.
The judiciary is “making progress,” she said, though she acknowledged that it’s been “slower than we would have hoped, primarily because of the judge vacancies.”
LaLonde noted that Vermont prosecutors are also handling a large number of complex and resource-intensive court cases, including 80 investigations into murders or attempted murders statewide. At the same time, LaLonde said that FBI data shows an uptick in some less serious offenses in Vermont — such as property crimes — since the onset of the pandemic. Several officials said that this increase in relatively minor crimes has also increased the workload for state’s attorneys and their deputies.
What’s more, these lower-level offenses can have a significant impact on people’s perception of public safety in their communities, Sullivan said.
(According to the FBI data, some relatively minor crimes have been on an uptick year-over-year since 2020 in Vermont, though they are overall less prevalent than they were a decade ago.)
The judiciary plans to ask the Legislature to fund at least two additional judge positions in 2024, Corsones said. One of those judges would likely serve on the state’s treatment court dockets, while the other would be a “floating” judge for northern Vermont. The judiciary also plans to seek funding for additional judicial staff positions, she said.
Lawmakers have noted, though, that more funding alone won’t be enough to address the case backlog. Another challenge — like in almost any industry, LaLonde said last week — is finding the people to fill those positions, and then retaining them.
LaLonde said his committee plans to take up a bill next year that would create a more standardized court diversion system statewide for people who have committed minor offenses. Currently, diversion options vary based on the county where someone lives, he said. Sending more people to diversion programs would reduce the burden on the court system, LaLonde reasoned, and provide a better experience for offenders.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is also interested in making changes to court diversion statewide, according to Sears, the panel’s chair.
Lawmakers may also consider other strategies to address the persistent backlog.
Rep. William Notte, D-Rutland City, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, plans to introduce a bill that would combine a person’s multiple misdemeanor theft charges into a single felony charge, designed to reduce the number of cases before judges.
The House committee also plans to consider legislation that would expedite the process by which judicial nominees are brought before the governor, hoping to limit the length of any future vacancies on the bench as much as possible, according to LaLonde.
Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham, who is vice chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he plans to introduce legislation that would offer stipends to law students who also work in a state’s attorney or public defender’s office. He said he hopes that the funding would bolster the ranks in those offices at a time when help is greatly needed.
Hashim called the backlog “one of the biggest issues” for the panel next year.
