by Jan Peter Dembinski, Esq.
Special Issue:
“Justice Goal Achieved,” The Vermont
Dreamer’s Free Press, May 1, 2085
The Crime Research Group announced
on Monday that not a single criminal conviction was the result of plea-bargaining in
2084. The offices of the Vermont Attorney
General, the Defender General, and the
Vermont Restorative Justice Coordinator
issued a joint statement to honor this justice achievement. Their statement reads:
Since 2020, officials of Vermont’s criminal justice system have striven for the
goal of eradicating plea-bargaining in
criminal cases. While huge strides have
been made in the last decades, 2084
marks the first year the criminal justice
system of our beloved state has been
entirely free from the blight of pleabargaining. We applaud our judges,
prosecutors, defense attorneys, and
restorative justice facilitators for all of
their efforts in helping make a longcherished dream of our respective offices a reality. We would also like to
thank the many governors and legislatures over the past decades who have
continued to decrease the mandatory minimum sentences for all criminal charges resolved through restorative justice processes. We applaud
the many hardworking facilitators at
our state’s community justice centers
and probation, parole, and restorative justice agreement fulfillment offices. Finally, we applaud the Vermont
Supreme Court for its many decisions
that have allowed for—and, indeed,
pointed the way towards—the gradual and voluntary expansion of restorative justice processes in lieu of pleabargaining.
The statement also pointed to the manydecades-long declines in criminal cases
and the annual budgets for the Vermont
Department of Corrections that have corresponded with the expanded use of restorative justice processes for crimes and
misdemeanors in Vermont.
Vermont has led the nation for years in
avoiding plea-bargaining with criminal cases and has consistently been one of the
states with the lowest crime rate per capita.
After Monday’s announcement by the
Crime Research Group, the current dean
of the University of Vermont’s Academy of
32
Restorative Justice, B. Free, spoke with the
Dreamer’s Free Press about the historical
roots of Vermont’s world-renowned justice
system.
Today it is hard to believe but even
when the restorative justice policy of
Vermont had been in existence for
many years at the turn of the century,
judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys continued to rely on plea-bargaining for nearly every criminal case
they dealt with—over 99% of the convictions were determined through the
connivance of three role players! And
these three role players—judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys—never had anything at stake in the outcome of these matters other than their
own careers, their abstract notions of
justice, and complying with the very
broad range of sentences allowed by
the legislature. They were seemingly blind to the light of the potential of
restorative justice processes in transforming relationships within communities and in engendering civic consciences in those charged with crimes.
Fortunately, there was an international conference on restorative justice at our University in the summer of 2014. After the conference, a
group of inspired legislators committed themselves to doing something—
anything—to help restorative justice
processes begin to take the place of
plea-bargaining with felony charges.
But they couldn’t decide on any means
that seemed politically feasible other
than to move the restorative justice
policy statute out of the title of statutes governing the Vermont Department of Corrections, Title 28, and into
the title of statutes governing criminal
justice, crimes and sentencing, Title
13.
Like the emergence of the original
statute, this step had no effect whatsoever on any of the criminal justice officials of the day until a class action lawsuit was brought by inmates in 2018
claiming ineffective assistance of counsel on the grounds that they had never been informed of their right to have
a reasonable effort made by criminal
justice officials to have their cases reTHE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL •