Restorative Justice
included the statute in the Vermont Statutes Annotated not in Title 4, “The Judiciary,” or Title 13, “Crimes and Criminal
Procedure,” but in Title 28, “Public Institutions and Corrections,” implies it is not directly in the domain of criminal court judges and prosecutors. But does the Department of Corrections have the responsibility
for seeing all the policy goals of 28 VSA §
2a implemented? How realistic is that? The
Department of Corrections cannot step in
and tell judges or prosecutors how to conduct their roles. Nonetheless, in the recently revised edition of its Sentencing Options
Manual, the Department has outlined proposed practices for how judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys could expand
the implementation of restorative justice in
the criminal justice system.12 But, to date, I
have come across no evidence its proposals are being taken seriously in any criminal
court in our state.
Attorney General William Sorrell in his
VPR “Vermont Edition” debate with T.J.
Donovan during the campaign for the attorney general seat in the 2012 election,
was asked, “Who bears the main responsibility for insuring that something is done in
the criminal justice system to actualize the
[restorative justice] statute’s policy goals,
state’s attorneys, judges, anyone?” His answer is informative:
It’s a combination. Certainly it is the
separate but equal branch of government, the judiciary, that is the ultimate
arbitrator of this, but law enforcement
has a role to play and, clearly, state’s
attorneys and the attorney general,
and the legislature in enacting statutes
that not only state a policy but can issue mandates just like the legislature
just did. I put out the bias-free policing
policy for law enforcement all over the
state. A number of departments adopted it but not all, so the legislature
just stepped in this session and mandated that departments have a biasfree policing policy as they should. So
it is a combination of a number of different players to reach this result that
we seek.13
First, it is important to note the agency Sorrell did not include in his list of responsible role players—the Department of
Corrections. And though Sorrell acknowledges that his office and the state’s prosecutors have roles to play in integrating
restorative justice into the criminal justice
system, his extended comment about the
role of the legislature implies he thinks that
if the legislature really wants the criminal
justice system to take effective statewide
steps to integrate restorative justice, then
it needs to mandate as much. Like most of
the rest of Vermont’s criminal justice sys-
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tem, the Attorney General’s Office under
Sorrell’s leadership has taken no discernible initiative that I can see in advancing
the stated goals of the restorative justice
statute. There is only one mention of restorative justice anywhere in the website of
the Office of the Attorney General, a noncommittal observation that court diversion
follows “a balanced and restorative justice model: putting right the wrongs that
have been done by addressing the needs
of all stakeholders, including the victim, the
community, and the offender.”14
How Did Restorative Justice
Become Vermont State Policy?
The awkward and ineffectual placement
of the restorative justice statute in Title 28
was a direct result of how the statute came
into existence in the first place. According
to John Gorczyk, Commissioner of Corrections at the time the statute c [YH[