 Welcome to election coverage by town meeting television. You are watching the Chittenden States Attorney Democratic debate. I'm Mayor Christine Lott and joining me this evening are Sarah George and Ted Kenny. Welcome candidates. Thank you. Thank you. So I have a series of questions to pose to each of you. Please keep your responses to about a minute and a half or less. I will be timing. I'll hold up my hand if you're starting to run long. If you go significantly over, I'll try to politely interrupt. We want to make sure that you each have equal air time. You may rebut or ask follow up questions if, you know, someone says something specific to the other. But I will try to keep us on track to get through all of these prepared questions. So with that, I want to start with opening statements. Sarah, I'll have you go first. Please tell us why you're running about the experience you bring to the position and what will be different for the people of your district and the state as a whole. Should you be reelected to the position? Thank you. And thank you for hosting this. I am Sarah George. I'm the Chittenden County States Attorney. I have been a prosecutor since I graduated law school. I started at the state's attorney's office in January of 2011. I was appointed to become the state's attorney in January 2017. And I've been the state's attorney since then. I have prosecuted thousands and thousands of cases from disorderly conducts, domestic assault, aggravated assault, attempted murder and murder. And what I have found while doing this work for nearly 12 years is that there are some things that work in our system and there are many things that do not work. And I have attempted to use my power, I have used my power as state's attorney to implement policies that I believe are actually making a difference in the system. They are working to dismantle parts of the system that are racist and classist and to lift up people in our community and organizations in our community instead of systems. I have implemented a racial equity policy, a truancy policy, a DUI diversion policy, a non-public safety stop policy and others that have had a direct impact on people of color in our communities, poor people, people with mental health issues and poor people in our community. And I will continue to do that. We have a lot more work to do. And I look forward to continuing this work to make sure that we have true public safety and a more just and fair system for all. Thank you, Sarah. Ted, your opening statement. Tell us why you're running, what experience you bring will be different for the people of the district and the state as a whole, should you be elected? Great. Well, thank you, Mayor, for hosting and thank you to everybody. My name is Ted Kenney. I am running for the Chittenden County State's Attorney nomination, the Democratic nomination. A little bit about myself. I am a native of Chittenden County. I was raised in Richmond, Vermont, the last of eight kids. I went to law school by going to night school, working full time and putting myself through school at night. Came back to Richmond and started my own practice. I got a public defender contract and I did a huge number of public defender cases. Also had a juvenile defender contract and I represented children and adults in delinquencies and abuse and neglect cases. I've had my own practice for a long time but then in 2020 I took an opportunity to become a division chief in the Attorney General's office where I supervised about 30 attorneys and lay staff. Along the lines, along the way, I've also been, I got married, I have two teenage daughters. I am the vice chair of the Wilson Select Board. I've tried to engage in as much charitable work as that life will allow. I was the president of the Vermont Dismiss House which is a halfway house for people just getting out of incarceration. I'm also on the board of directors of the joint urban ministry project which is designed to help people get out of, well, help people around the fringes that public systems doesn't help like soap and dishwater and dishwashing liquid and things like that. I'm running for state's attorney because I think we have new challenges and I would like to propose new solutions. Thank you, Ted. I'm going to move on to, I'll switch orders as we go. So you're up next again, Ted. How will you address the rising crime rate, increased vandalism and prevalence of vagrancy in and around Burlington? Well, it's a very complicated situation and I am not running claiming that I have all the answers and I'm also not running saying that it's going to be easy. I don't believe whoever wins. I think the next four years, eight years, ten years are going to be difficult. My belief is that a lot of these things are interconnected. I believe that the rise in retail theft is directly related to the rise in opiate use and opiate overdoses. I believe that a lot of the, those drug use is causing a lot of the situation in Burlington and other towns. I mean, Richmond had an issue with needles at the park and ride. Williston has had similar things. What I propose to do is to take a closer look at which cases go to alternative justice, the reports. I am a big supporter of reports and on the select board in Williston, I have voted to fund those and to fund them even more. As a former public defender and a private defense attorney, I think those things are awesome and I think they're great. But I think we need to make sure that repeat offenders and people who are more engaged in more serious conduct don't go. I also think that we need to make sure that if they do go that they either fulfill the program or they be brought back to criminal division. I'm not saying we're going to put everybody in jail at all, never would. I also think we need to tighten up a little bit on public safety conditions of course. Thank you, Ted. Sarah, same question. How will you address the rising crime vandalism and vagrancy? I think the question needs to be broken down a little bit, so I'm going to try to do that quickly. But the rising crime I think is the first thing to say is that the data really supports that only a few crimes are rising and that actually overall crime in Burlington is down significantly over the last 10 years. And then I think that it's important to the vandalism, I assume. I'm not really sure what that means. Vandalism isn't a criminal charge. So I assume that they might be just talking about graffiti. If the question is related to graffiti, then our office hasn't received those cases. They're very hard to prove. It is most often found to be kids. And I think that there needs to be a community response to that to try to address the issues and making sure that it gets cleaned up. But they're not cases that are coming to our office. And then the vagrancy issue I think is, I think it's really important to note that that's not a prosecutor's job. And that I understand that some people are uncomfortable looking at the homeless people that we have in our community and that pre-COVID, we had 32, I believe, chronically homeless people in Burlington. We now have 160 post-COVID. Not that we're post-COVID, but where we are in COVID. And prosecution is not the answer to that. Homes are the answer to that. Jobs are the answer to that. Childcare is the answer to that. And significant mental health and substance use services, all of which, due to COVID and other issues, are not being fully resourced. They're not fully available to most people in our community. So we really need to focus on the underlying issues and the root causes for a lot of these issues and not rely on the legal system. Sarah, so you often declined to prosecute lower level offenses, such as quality of life, petty theft, etc. Do you intend to prosecute more low level offenses or repeat offenders than you have in the past? Or how will your response be? Again, I'm not really sure what that means. We certainly decline certain cases, but we don't have a policy around declining whole groups of cases. We don't have a policy around declining quality of life offenses. The cases that might be going to restorative justice and certainly more through COVID are a lot of those cases, but that is a decision that's made between law enforcement and their local CJC. Through COVID, our backlog is significant and we have received a lot of pressure from the court to limit the number of cases that we have coming in. So we have probably asked law enforcement or we have asked law enforcement to use those services outside of the legal system more often than normal. And we are still in that. I know that the city lifted their state of emergency. The state certainly has, but the court actually just extended ours through the end of August. So we have a significant backlog, but we also have 421 pending retail theft cases. So the idea that we maybe aren't charging these cases isn't accurate, but they aren't getting prioritized by the court because we have other cases that we are trying to prioritize and trying to move through the system. So some of that may change as our court opens up more. And some of it is just underlying issues that we need, like I said before, that we really need to be addressing in other ways instead of relying on the legal system that in the best of circumstances doesn't work great and it certainly doesn't when we are in a judicial emergency. Thank you, Sarah. Ted, do you intend to prosecute more lower level offenses such as quality of life, petty theft, et cetera, or repeat offenders? Well, not per se. I mean, the idea that you're just going to bring more cases in just to do it and show that you're tough on crime or something is something I would never, ever do. I don't like the phrase tough on crime. I think it usually hides an intent to just, you know, use prison or something. And I'm not in favor of that. But in terms of the lower level stuff, a lot of it is very vexatious. A lot of it is actually hurts people. A lot of it does create victims. If there is a repeat offense of these lower level things and the reparative boards are not getting a response out of these people and the system, you know, then they need to come into the criminal justice system. Within that context, I'm not saying that everybody who comes into the criminal justice system is going to have to do time in jail or something like that. You know, there are a lot of different ways that a case can be resolved, including going back to the reparative system if it's deemed appropriate. But I do think that cases where there is a repeat disturbance and quality of life has to, if it's repeated, it has to come into the criminal justice system because the people who are being disturbed are real people too. And they need to be protected. Thank you. A similar question about lower level offenses. There's significant reason to believe that some police are targeting BIPOC community members using non-safety related reasons to stop drivers. The Chittenden County office currently has a policy that such stops will presumptively result in declining to prosecute as they're connected to racial bias. Would you at a minimum maintain that current policy or would you have a different approach? Me? Yes. No, I would not maintain that policy. The reason I would not maintain, I understand the intent of it and the intent is a good intent to combat the actual racism that is the stats show. I believe it's an implied racism. I want to say something about that. I have experience with BIPOC people and as much as my family is half BIPOC. I have learned through personal painful experience that I believe we all have inherent racism. We all have implicit bias. So it's not surprising that these numbers are going to be different and bad. The question is what you do about it. And the problem with the policy as I see it is that the Vermont state police say that 40% of their DUI cases that they arrest happen from cases where they didn't have any indicia that the person was drunk when they pulled them over. In other words, a non-public safety motor vehicle stop. That is a huge percentage of DUI cases that are going to be left on the road and that's a huge public safety issue. So I think it's a real issue. It's got to be addressed. I don't believe that that policy is the way to do it. I think it goes too far. And I think we need to try a lot more training, consistent training, a pattern of training over and over again and continual monitoring of this issue. And if we're not making progress, then I will find some other way because it's a real issue and it does need to be resolved. Thank you, Ted. Sarah, will you retain the policy of not charging cases based on non-safety traffic stops? Yes, of course. I spent a lot of time researching and developing and implementing the policy. I believe in it. I believe it is an actual action that will and does result in less people of color coming into the system. I cannot control what the police do, but I can when I saw the disparities and how many of those were leading to drug charges on people of color versus white counterparts. I realized there was something I could do about it and that's where the policy came from. We do still look at every single case that is sent to us. Some of them we are declining and there are some that we have continued through and made a decision to charge regardless. It is a presumption to decline. It is not a blanket declination of all charges. Thank you. We heard a little bit earlier about the opioid crisis that's happening here. Vermont is unprecedented rate of deadly overdose occurring. There has been talk about overdose prevention sites where people can use their own drugs if you have medical personnel ready to do life-saving work. This has been implemented in other locations around the world. Would you support the opening of overdose prevention sites here in Vermont? That's to you first, Sarah. Thank you. Yes, wholeheartedly. Again, in 2017, one of the first things I did as state's attorney was to get together a commission of experts in our community, both made up of people who serve folks who are suffering from substance use disorder, people who have used people in recovery, law enforcement and others to determine whether or not safe consumption sites or something that Vermont should consider and specifically Chittenden County should consider given our overdose numbers at the time. The report that was written by this commission was overwhelmingly and resoundingly in support of it and I was one of the first to openly endorse and call on our community as well as state legislature to pass a bill allowing them and I've been working since on several committees with the mayor's office and with other advocates in the community to find ways that even without the legislation we can open a safe consumption space similar to what New York City has done recently and found wild success and a significant amount of lives saved. Thank you, Ted. Do you support the opening of overdose prevention sites in Vermont? I wish I had a blanket answer one way or the other now because it would be probably better for me in terms of how I'm perceived but I don't. The harm reduction has to occur. Too many people are dying and too many people are overdosing and then even if they don't die that's still a terrible thing to go through. Too many people are using these drugs and are destroying themselves and their family lives and if we can do something to prevent overdoses then I'm in favor of it. The reason I'm not sure about this is because it is a vast public policy decision to make. Weighing things like this will require weighing whether we put new dollars into it or not. I imagine that we would have to and if those dollars are being used there they're not being used somewhere else. Other questions that arise like how are these people going to get home and how are we going to make sure that they don't drive or something like that when we don't have a big public transportation system in Vermont? When we had to get an ambulance service in the town of Wooliston we initially said no because there were other things that we had to spend the money on and as I said then if I have a crisis going on in my house that needs an ambulance I want nine ambulances in town but public policy is never as simple as just saying okay let's get this done and taken care of. What other cost benefit is there going to be? What other opportunities are not going to be funded and how is it going to be administered in terms of making sure everybody's safe? Thank you Tim. I want to start with you again on this one. There are some when folks are released with conditions there are some challenges specific to our homeless community. For example it is common to request a curfew as a condition of release but it would be difficult for a person who is homeless to abide by. Do you believe it's appropriate to not request conditions of release based on a person's status of housing? Me? Yes. It's a very tough moment. It depends as with so many things about what specific crime we're talking about and the characteristics of the person. I have a huge place in my heart for the homeless. I've shared in this campaign I've shared throughout my entire life that we had eight kids in my family two of my brothers were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after they did a lot of drugs in college chicken or the egg I don't know what caused what but I do know that my oldest brother ended up being homeless and while he was homeless was ended up being murdered in Central Park in New York City. The homeless are real people that's somebody's brother and I don't want to keep somebody in jail who is somebody's brother and who in many ways is my brother if there is another way to do it but where the situation arises where there's a repeat offense over and over and over again then reluctantly that does have to be considered and it does have to be requested of the court so if somebody is doing you know committing a crime over and over again then after a while the weighing of homelessness versus the weighing of threat to the public or vexation to the public begins to shift and a advocacy for a condition of release with a curfew would have to be made. Sarah same question would you release folks experiencing homelessness without condition? Thank you so I would say that conditions of release are different for every case it doesn't necessarily I wouldn't say that nobody who's homeless doesn't get conditions of release each person and their individual circumstances are what we take into account and what they're charged with and what the law allows for. I don't think curfews for people who are homeless are helpful I think that they are set up for failure and that most of those folks will be arrested within a day for something that they have no control over but there's other ways you know we have in some cases with people who are homeless to make sure that they continue to come to court we have them check in at the public defender's office for example or check in with their attorney understanding that a lot of them don't have phones either so we have to sometimes find different ways to make sure that people are staying engaged with their service providers or their pretrial monitor if we've if we've connected them with one of those there are a lot of other ways that we can try to address the issues and make sure that people and folks are are either staying in touch with their attorney or coming to court. A curfew for a particular homeless person I don't personally think is all that helpful some people are in hotels and that hotel is changing every week so that can sometimes lead again to sort of set up for them but does it mean we've never done it I probably not I'm sure we have and in some cases it's probably worked and in some cases I'm sure it hasn't. Thank you for that so starting with you again Sarah. Chittenden County is home to the largest immigrant communities in Vermont as state's attorney would you be willing to put into policy or train and direct your prosecutors to consider the immigration consequences of a conviction? Yes I actually have I have a racial equity policy and part of that policy it is to direct deputy state's attorneys to consider collateral consequences for anybody that they are prosecuting but it does of course for obvious reasons more likely impact our new American population and other racial groups more than otherwise so yes I not only would but I have. And Ted would you continue that policy having staff consider the consequences of immigration during each stage of the case? Yeah the short answer is yes I think that needs to happen because the collateral consequences of very in every case have to be considered otherwise it becomes just rote and that leads to injustice particularly for the immigrant community where the consequence of certain convictions is massive it's a discretionary process so a lot of times that will carry the day but sometimes it won't but the short answer is generally yes. Thank you and I think there's time for one more question before we do closing and so I'll start with you Ted. How do you intend to create equity between BIPOC defendants and indigent clients with white defendants of means? What steps have you taken to implement policies that would address this? Well I'm not state's attorney yet so I haven't taken any steps for that. It's a real issue here's the difficulty taking into consideration somebody's race is frankly just unconstitutional it violates the equal protection clause of the federal constitution it violates the common benefits clause of the state constitution and taking those things into account can cut in so many different ways somebody can say that I wasn't treated fairly because I had a more harsh consequence because of my race because I'm white or because I'm black or Asian but it's a deeper thing than that. There's such a thing as inherited wealth and there's such a thing as inherited poverty unfortunately the legacy of racism in the United States and in Vermont and in Chittenden County and in our hearts has led to inherited poverty for a lot of BIPOC members of the BIPOC community that and their circumstances their education the other life experiences they've had absolutely has to be taken into account because if you don't then again it just becomes rote and ultimately it can lead to cruel consequences. Thank you Ted and Sarah how do you intend to create equity between BIPOC defendants and indigent clients what steps have you taken to implement policies? So I think you know most of my policies are indirectly have that impact my cash bail policy for example when I implemented that policy we ran a list got a list from DOC about how many people are being held on cash bail from Chittenden County and every single one of them had a public defender none of them had a private attorney and a disproportionate amount of them were people of color so when I implemented the cash bail policy not only does that address the wealth issue but it also addresses the race issue when I did the non-public safety stop policy of course that might also benefit white people but the data shows that it will also and more often benefit people of color in our community so a lot of those policies have that indirect impact because of our data and our disproportionate prison population and our disproportionate policing that we have in our community. Another thing that we've done is our DUIs are probably one of the most likely cases to be represented by private attorneys versus public defenders and we found with prior administration when I was a deputy state attorney I found that a lot of private attorneys were essentially buying their clients out of probation so when we would have an offer of probation they would just ask and we would agree often to a higher fine in place of that we no longer do that. Thank you so much for that we are nearing the end of our time I'll give you a minute to share a closing statement Sarah you're first. Thank you and thank you again for hosting I'm so impressed that you got it done in half an hour. I'm really I'm the state attorney I'm running for reelection because I believe we have a lot more work to do for the last five and a half years I have worked tirelessly to not only do this job I have a full caseload I believe in this work but also to disrupt the status quo and dismantle a system that is the foundation of which is racist and classist and actually take steps not just saying certain things and talking to talk but actually take real steps to address those underlying issues and attempt to dismantle a system that oppresses people in our community mostly people of color and causes more harm than it does good I believe we have a lot more work to do I am asking for people to vote for me on August 9th so we can continue to build a true public safety system and a more system more just system for all. Thank you so much Sarah George Ted you're up with your closing last word. Thank you and thank you for hosting and thank you everybody who's watching I'm running for state's attorney because I do believe that we have new challenges I believe that they are caused by fundamentally COVID and economic upheaval and the race and economic tensions that resulted from the last five years the question is what do we do about it and I believe that we need new policies to address that I do not believe that we need to go back to old policies I do not believe in mass incarceration or in automatic jail sentences I stood next to people in federal court who were being victimized racially by mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines that were absolute I don't believe in absolutes I believe that justice is almost always an exercise in exceptions I believe that we can do better than we're doing now but I also believe that we have to that the heart of the law is mercy and we need to show compassion I just believe that we can show compassion and the more firmness that the new issues require thank you. Thank you so much to both of you thank you for joining tonight thank you to Tom Tom meeting tv for hosting and those folks who submitted questions don't forget to vote in the primary august 9th early voting by mail or in person is available now by contacting your town clerk's office polls will be open august 9 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. thank you for watching