Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Summer 2014, Vol. 40, No. 2 | Page 23

by Chris Dinnan Special Issue: A Facilitator’s Reflections on Restorative Justice Conferencing in Vermont I have worked for the Vermont Department of Corrections for over twenty-five years now, starting as a Volunteer Services Coordinator at the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility, then becoming a Community Resources Coordinator for both that facility and for the Rutland, Addison, and Bennington county probation and parole offices, and now serving as a Community Corrections Program Supervisor at Rutland probation and parole. Over that time, I have been privileged to both observe and participate in the blossoming of restorative justice practices in Vermont. In total, I have facilitated/coordinated well over fifty such applications in cases ranging from broken windows to broken lives. My focus below will be on the broken lives end of that spectrum and how restorative practices have impacted and, in the future, may impact more sentencing outcomes. By way of background, my involvement in the restorative justice movement in Vermont has not been limited to the VT DOC, as I have also been able to coordinate/facilitate such practices further “upstream” in community justice centers, court diversion programs, the Department for Children and Families, and in middle and high schools. Within the VT DOC, these processes have been applied pre-charge through the state’s attorney’s office, pre-sentence as part of the pre-sentence investigation, post-sentence as a condition of probation, pre-release from incarceration, and once, for instance, as part of a governor’s pardon investigation over twenty years after the criminal incident occurred. My first real exposure to restorative justice was a two-day training I attended about twenty years ago offered through VT DOC by the RealJustice organization, now the International Institute for Restorative Practices, out of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This training prepared practitioners to facilitate “family group conferences.” In fact, this was the first of many such trainings offered over the years in Vermont through VT DOC that have prepared hundreds of individuals to provide this service. Unfortunately, the systems were not in place at the time to take full advantage of this resource. Now, those systems have changed and apwww.vtbar.org pear poised for transformation. Almost simultaneously, in 1995, under the leadership of then-VT DOC Commissioner John Gorczyk, the reparative probation program, firmly grounded in principles of restorative justice, was launched as an alternative to traditional probation in Vermont. This program has been very effective in dealing with minor, non-violent offenses by engaging the offender (and victim(s) if they choose) with a panel of trained community volunteers in a process to address the incident, to reflect on who was affected and how, and to determine what is needed to occur as a result. While originally nonviolent offenders were the sole target population for the reparative probation program, this too appears to be changing as restorative justice implementation moves forward in Vermont. I will discuss below three cases in which the crime happened to be one of severe violence, two with death resulting, and how along the criminal justice continuum the convening of a restorative justice process affected the outcome of the cases. Anywhere along that continuum, there is almost always a relationship between the plea-bargaining process and the sentencing outcome, as the vast majority of cases do not end with a jury determining guilt or innocence. Sentencing is almost always determined by an admission of guilt and an agreement as to consequences. It is universally agreed among practitioners that restorative justice at its core needs to be victim-focused and offendersensitive. With this in mind, it has always felt particularly compelling to me that the more severe the offense, the more consideration should be taken to offer victims and offenders a means by which to address the classic restorative justice questions: What happened? Who was affected and how? What needs to occur now so that, to the extent possible, the harm can be addressed? In fact, at least historically, it has been the less severe offenses that have gotten more attention regarding employing restorative justice processes. One of the roles of the VT DOC in the criminal justice system is to perform presentence investigations, which include senTHE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SUMMER 2014 tencing recommendations, for the court. Typically, an admission of guilt has been made, and there is a plea agreement in place. It is notable in the following case that no admission of guilt had been initially made prior to the ordering of a preplea investigation by the court. In this case, a young woman had been charged with Grossly Negligent Operation with Death Resulting, a felony that could result in imprisonment for up to fifteen years and a fine of up to $15,000. At the initial arraignment, she pled not guilty on the advice of her counsel. Also on the advice of counsel, she had not contacted the family of the deceased victim in spite of the fact that she had strongly wanted to do so. A total of five status conferences were held over a substantial period of time before it became clear that the state and the defense were nowhere near reaching a plea agreement. The parties agreed to, and Judge Theresa DiMauro orde ɕ