The arraignment for Rep. Jim Carroll, D-Bennington, on a charge of driving under the influence following a traffic stop outside the Vermont Statehouse last month was pushed back on Thursday as he undergoes treatment at a residential facility.
During a brief proceeding in Washington County Superior criminal court in Barre, Judge John Pacht granted a continuance for Carroll’s arraignment and rescheduled it for April 4.
Carroll did not attend the proceeding. According to Carroll’s court motion for the continuance, he is at the Valley Vista treatment facility in Bradford.
Attorney Avi Springer, a public defender, told the judge he had filed the motion on Carroll’s behalf. Answering a question from Pacht, Springer said he was not sure whether Carroll would hire private counsel.
Carroll was arrested at around 8:30 a.m. on Feb. 21 after he pulled into a parking lot outside the Statehouse.
In an affidavit recently made public, Montpelier Police Sgt. Christopher Quesnel wrote that he followed Carroll as the lawmaker drove a Honda Accord with an ”excessively” loud muffler into a parking spot. As Carroll got out of the car, Quesnel wrote, Carroll acknowledged that the vehicle had a “defective” exhaust, saying that the pipe had come apart.
Quesnel wrote that he saw several empty “Natty Daddy” beer cans in a reusable shopping bag in the car and included an image of them taken by his body camera.
While speaking to Carroll, the sergeant wrote, he smelled a “moderately strong odor of intoxicants emitting from his person” and saw that Carroll’s eyes were bloodshot and watery.
“When asked, Carroll admitted to consuming alcohol the night prior, and would later state he consumed beer sometime around or 3 or 4 AM to help him sleep,” Quesnel wrote.
Quesnel wrote that he asked Carroll to submit to standardized field sobriety exercises, but Carroll refused. Carroll later told VTDigger following his arrest that he declined to take those tests because he had medical conditions that affected his balance.
Carroll agreed to a roadside breath test at about 8:31 a.m. which indicated a blood alcohol concentration of 0.081, just above the 0.08 legal limit for driving in Vermont, according to the affidavit.
Carroll was then taken to the Montpelier police station for processing for DUI. An evidentiary test there registered 0.066 at 9:22 a.m., nearly an hour after the earlier breath test, the filing stated.
Amanda Bolduc, a senior forensic chemist employed by the Vermont Forensic Laboratory as the toxicology section supervisor, also submitted an affidavit in the case. She calculated Carroll had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.081 at the time of operating the vehicle, with a range of between 0.076 and 0.095.
“The assumptions made about the subject’s state of absorption and elimination rate are based on population averages published in peer reviewed scientific literature,” Bolduc wrote.
Pacht, the judge, told attorneys on Thursday that he was leaving the door open for a possible challenge to the probable cause in support of the DUI charge.
Carroll, in a written statement and phone interviews with VTDigger on the day of his arrest, had said he did not plan to contest the charge and planned to enter rehab. He told VTDigger he regretted his actions.
In Town Meeting Day voting earlier this week, Carroll lost a seat on the Bennington Selectboard that he had held for the past dozen years, finishing fourth in a field of four candidates for two seats on the panel.
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Montpelier Police Sgt. Christopher Quesnel.
