State's Attorneys and Sheriffs urge funding, cite caseload pressures and new legislative priorities
Loading...
Summary
The Vermont Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs told the Senate Government Operations Committee the office has reduced backlogs but still faces high caseloads, transport staffing shortages and rising violent-case filings; they urged funding and legislative changes including firearm penalties, a state RICO law and DUI evidence updates.
Tim Lieters Dumont, executive director of the Vermont Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs, told the Senate Government Operations Committee on Jan. 8 that his office has made progress on an accountability docket pilot but continues to face staffing, transport and caseload pressures.
Dumont said the department converted nine limited-service positions to permanent roles and credited committee appropriations with avoiding layoffs. He reported a roughly 15% reduction in backlog over three years and said average attorney caseloads declined from about 375 to about 300, but noted statewide pending cases remain high—about 22,000—down from roughly 26,000 a few years ago.
Why it matters: prosecutors said the mix of filings—particularly drug-nexus and firearm-related cases—has driven recent increases in violent-case filings, creating pressure on court time and transport resources. Dumont said the department documented 34 homicide filings counted on a filing basis in the most recent year and stressed the difference between incident dates and filing dates when interpreting trends.
The department highlighted the accountability docket in Chittenden County as a promising model: assigning a deputy state's attorney and a special prosecutor helped move roughly 412 of 878 targeted cases in a focused period. "We moved 50% of the cases that we started with, which is huge," Dumont said, attributing the result to coordination with the governor's office, Agency of Human Services, defender general and the judiciary.
Committee members pressed for more granular data. One senator asked whether homicides would be broken down by type (for example, domestic violence), and Dumont said his office can produce a drill-down and will include additional detail in the soon-to-be-published annual snapshot (data as of Dec. 10).
Operational constraints: Dumont described transport staffing shortages and escalating overtime for deputies who move detained people to court. He said the department requested funding in its VAA request for transport overtime and per diem, adding that transport vacancies are competing with other law-enforcement agencies.
Legislative priorities: Kim McManus, the department's legislative and policy attorney, outlined several priorities the department will support this session. They include H.200 (to align state firearms-possession prohibitions with federal standards for persons subject to hospitalization or treatment orders) and a proposal to make theft of any firearm a felony regardless of value. The department also supports creating a state-level racketeering/organized-crime statute to pursue organizers behind retail theft, firearm trafficking and drug distribution.
On impaired-driving law, McManus said Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutors have proposed technical updates, including authorizing saliva as an evidentiary sample in some cases to shorten evidence-collection delays. Committee members asked the department and forensic lab representatives to return with technical detail on saliva-test reliability.
The meeting closed with agreement to supply requested charts and county breakdowns from the snapshot report and with offers to bring additional experts (forensic lab staff, TSRPs) to follow up.
Next steps: the department will send the snapshot report and disposition breakdowns to the committee; some priorities will be considered in House Judiciary and Senate Judiciary committees in coming weeks.
