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Senate advances bill to escalate penalties for repeat retail theft after committee report
Summary
The Senate adopted the judiciary committee report on H534, endorsing an escalating-penalty approach that preserves misdemeanors for early offenses and raises repeat offenses to felony-level punishment; the bill was ordered for third reading.
The Vermont Senate on the floor advanced H534, a bill that revises the state's retail theft statute to impose escalating penalties for repeat offenses and to respond to testimony that the current $900 threshold has been exploited by repeat offenders.
Senator from Chittenden Central, reporting for the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the committee adopted a graduated scale: a first offense would remain a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500 or up to 30 days in jail, a second offense a misdemeanor with a fine of up to $1,000 or up to six months' imprisonment, and a third offense would be treated as a felony with substantially higher penalties. "Some of the stakeholders believe the $900 limit that divides misdemeanors and felonies is the problem," the reporter said, describing committee findings and the committee's preference for an escalating-offense framework rather than a short-window aggregation approach.
The committee vote on its recommendation was reported on the floor as 4-1-0. Senators pressed for clarifications: the bill leaves sentencing ranges to judicial discretion, and the committee emphasized that low-level incidents would likely remain at the bottom end of the scale under typical fact patterns. Senator from Essex said she supported the bill but would prefer a regime keyed to instances of offending rather than dollar amounts; "sometimes, being a former store owner myself, somebody takes a bottle of soda from you," she said, urging attention to how the law treats singular low-value incidents.
The Senate voted to adopt the committee's report and ordered the bill read a third time; a floor roll-call tally for the final passage vote was not recorded in the transcript before the Senate moved on to the next calendar item.
Next steps: H534 has been ordered for third reading on the Senate calendar, allowing final floor passage and any final-stage amendments before the measure would be sent on for enactment procedures.
