State prosecutors cite 22,000 pending cases and point to accountability dockets as relief
Get AI-powered insights, summaries, and transcripts
Subscribe
Summary
Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs told the Senate Judiciary committee that Vermont has roughly 22,000 pending cases (19,000 criminal), highlighted a successful accountability‑docket pilot that cleared about 500 of 890 dockets, and urged legislative and administrative steps including scheduling reforms and modest staffing increases to reduce backlog.
The Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 16 that Vermont continues to carry a large pending caseload and urged the Legislature to expand successful accountability‑docket practices and address transport and staffing bottlenecks.
Tim Leers Dumont, executive director of the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs, said the department still has “about 22,000 pending cases in our system, of which 19,000 are criminal cases,” and described recent clearance rates that exceeded 100 percent in snapshots of the past two to three years. He added that the state files roughly “12 to 13,000 cases a year in the criminal system.”
The department highlighted an accountability‑docket pilot as a concrete tool to move lower‑level matters more quickly. Leers Dumont said the pilot began with about 890 dockets and “as of yesterday, we cleared 500 cases of this 890 that we originally started with relating to about a 100 defendants,” calling the pilot a model for resolving nonviolent misdemeanors and freeing court capacity for felony work.
Committee members pressed the department for historical context on pending caseloads. Leers Dumont acknowledged the need for more granular incident‑date reporting and offered to query older pending‑case lists (2018–2019) and to provide additional affidavit‑level detail where possible.
Leaders also flagged operations and staffing constraints that complicate wider deployment of the accountability model. The department said some counties lack local services or transport capacity and recommended regional or floating models — for example, “a couple of floating judges and maybe even a couple of floating … service related folks” — to replicate Chittenden County’s success without duplicating expensive resources. Leers Dumont said the department currently has 21 filled transport deputy positions against 25 FTEs and recommended a staffing target of about 30 transport deputies (40 would be better) to reduce overtime and improve scheduling.
Sheriffs and prosecutors told the committee that scheduling reforms could achieve savings. Leers Dumont said judges’ adoption of block scheduling between core hours would cut overtime and produce more predictable hearings for defendants, while sheriffs described unpredictable inmate movements between correctional facilities as a major driver of long transport trips and added overtime.
The department made materials available on the committee’s website and offered to return with more detailed historical data and a deeper breakdown of filings by incident year, charge type and disposition as requested.
The committee did not take any formal votes; members scheduled further markup and follow‑up on related legislation.