A report from the Vermont Judiciary suggests that more domestic violence cases are being charged as felonies, and fewer are being charged as misdemeanors.
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A skinny, blond 25-year-old named Zackery Rillo stood in a courtroom in Barre wearing jeans and a plaid shirt. He looked down, away from the judge in front of him.
If she let Rillo stay in the community pending trial, the judge wanted to know, would he be living with the woman he’s charged with assaulting?
The victim walked up to the state’s attorney. “I don’t live there,” she said.
The judge released the man without a bond.
This arraignment was for just one of the roughly 1,200 domestic violence cases that make their way through Vermont’s courts each year. The overall number of cases appears to be dropping, in line with the state’s crime rate.
Yet the Judiciary's report, which has not been validated, says felony domestic violence case filings are "58% higher than a decade ago."
On request, the Judiciary provided a lengthy disclaimer about its case management data. But on its face, the Judiciary’s report suggests that over the last 10 years, domestic violence cases are increasingly brought and resolved as serious felonies each year, and decreasingly as misdemeanors.
The Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council training coordinator, Jennifer Firpo, said 10 years ago is about the same time a new law went into effect which required Vermont police officers to get domestic violence training.
In the years before 2010, Firpo said, the state had strengthened its domestic violence laws, and researchers had updated best practices for collecting evidence and building cases. But law enforcement officers were not receiving training on the changes.
Since 2010, all Vermont police officers receive mandatory training about domestic violence every other year.
Firpo said many long-time officers may have received the new training and thought, "Wow, what I thought was a misdemeanor really actually fits that felony [law.]"
Firpo also said sentiments associated with the #MeToo movement may be helping society take women more seriously when they are assaulted or harassed by men.
All of this makes it seem like more felony domestic charges are good news. But not everyone sees it that way, even in law enforcement.
Washington County State’s Attorney Rory Thibault prosecuted the young man in Barre. He worries the numbers indicate prosecutors are failing to prevent recidivism, because a common way to get a felony domestic charge is to commit a misdemeanor offense after having a prior domestic violence conviction on your record.
Thibault wondered, “Are interventions at that misdemeanor level, or the first time an offender's coming to court, are they successful at mitigating future risk?”
In the meantime, Defender General Matt Valerio questioned the numbers themselves.
“My sense is they're counting something. I have no idea what they're counting," he said, "I don't even know if they're counting the same thing year to year.”
According Vermont’s office of the state court administrator, the report did not count the same things year to year. New domestic violence laws have been passed and others have been strengthened during these 10 years of data. The numbers reflect those changes as they occur.
The office provided this list of Vermont statutes it considers domestic violence as of May 23, 2019.
Valerio said there’s something else that may have influenced the data. The idea of domestic violence, he said, has begun "to encompass things that it didn’t encompass years ago."
Valerio said when he began working at the Defender General's office 18 years ago, domestic violence charges were only used for intimate partner violence. Now, he said, prosecutors bring domestic charges for incidents between grown siblings, or adult children and parents.
It’s hard to know how often this happens, but it could have an impact. After all, with one prior domestic violence conviction — the next one is a felony.