True Vermont

The Burlington Free Press reported on October 27^th that the Vermont U.S. Attorney’s Office had filed papers for the civil forfeiture of the Lambda Iota fraternity house on Pearl St. in Burlington because a few fraternity members were allegedly selling drugs, and two members of the Board of Governors were among the customers. (The article closely follows a press release from the U.S. Attorney.) Meanwhile the property’s owners, the 600+ member Lambda Iota Society, are the ones in line to take the loss. This seems like a return to the real estate feeding frenzy during the bad old days of the George Terwilliger administration (1986-1991), an administration severely criticized by U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy.

The civil forfeiture statutes rely on the absurd notion that the property itself is guilty, and real estate can still be forfeited even though the owner has been found innocent of any underlying crimes. The abuses of these statutes were so numerous and so blatant that many U.S. Attorneys turned instead to the criminal forfeiture statutes in cases where forfeiture was warranted. Congress also stepped in, most recently passing the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (See 18 USC 983(d)) Apparently it’s still not enough to protect innocent owners from legalized theft by the federal government.

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An earlier post, CSI Vermont, urged skepticism regarding conclusions of forensics laboratories and mentioned the previous inquiry into the operations of the FBI lab.  Apparently the FBI learned nothing.  Following a joint investigation, 60 Minutes and the Washington Post   reported the FBI’s use of bullet lead analysis to tie crime bullets to a specific box of (usually 50 handgun or 20 rifle) cartridges was junk science, as concluded by the National Science Foundation. The Post has a nice, layman’s description of the problem.  

Confronted with this finding the FBI did not come clean, but rather sent out a letter to lawyers that the agency planned to stop reliance on bullet lead analysis, even though the agency “still firmly supports the scientific foundation of” the test, the same scientific foundation that had been discredited by the NSF study.  Beware.

Green Mountain Daily has recently reported that the Vermont State Police, under the guise of implementing the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System (18 VSA §4281 et. seq.), are data mining by obtaining the entire pharmacy prescription records of everyone prescribed a Schedule II, III or IV drug – and all without a warrant. As Justice Denise Johnson wrote in her dissent in State v. Welch : “…[I]ndividuals have a privacy interest in their prescription records. Such records contain extremely private and potentially embarrassing information about the patient…They may disclose highly personal facts concerning a person’s lifestyle, ailments, or sources of stress and anxiety…These are matters of great sensitivity that go to the heart of our concerns for privacy. ”

Many of former governor Howard Dean’s gubernatorial papers were a secret despite great efforts to obtain them during his presidential bid, and Governor Douglas has tried to assert a “deliberative privilege” for documents he didn’t want the public to see. Perhaps the most secretive entity in Vermont’s government is the Judicial Conduct Board which handles complaints against judges. It looks like it’s only your privacy that’s not important.

Windsor lawyer and part-time judge Martha Davis was recently busted for marijuana possession and cultivation. According to the affidavit of game warden Stephen Majeski, on 10/10/07 he received a complaint at 8:00 am via Rockingham dispatch from Ms. Davis about a dead deer on her property. When he arrived at the property a half-hour later, Ms. Davis was not there, but the warden took a look around for the deer. Around the back of the house, Majeski “observed a large black plastic planter placed amongst the other plants. Inside the planter [he] observed two large recently cut stalks, and what appeared through my training to be, a marijuana bud approximately one foot long, and seven smaller offshoots…” Read more »

Windsor County State’s Attorney Robert Sand gave Windsor lawyer Martha Davis, 61, a diversion program for possession of 2 1/2 pounds of marijuana and 32 small plants. This so outraged Gov. Douglas that he ordered the Vermont State Police, the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles to send their “significant” pot cases to either U.S. Attorneys or the Vermont Attorney General for prosecution. “We can’t have a situation in Vermont where in 13 other of our counties, possession is treated as the felony it is, and possibly result in jail time, and in another county someone gets a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Douglas.

Meanwhile, the police in Douglas’ hometown, Middlebury, have adopted a new policy (with the approval of the selectboard) to ignore the hordes of illegal immigrants from south of the border working and living on area farms. Read more »

With the tremendous popularity of CSI (and CSI New York and CSI Miami) the public now places great faith in crime labs. After all, there are strict procedures and the forensic scientists have little apparent reason to lie. Unfortunately, the public should be more skeptical. The famed FBI lab was rocked by allegations of incompetence and wrongdoing in 1997, many of which were confirmed after an investigation by the Solicitor General. More recently Texas, Virginia and Minnesota have created oversight boards to investigate their labs.

Closer to home, the Vermont Crime Lab had a scandal of its own in 1992-1993 after revelations that two of the five forensic scientists had helped themselves to regulated drugs from the lab.

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