Last December, as disturbing details emerged about the death of an inmate at a northern Vermont prison, Secretary of Human Services Mike Smith pledged to conduct an internal review of what went wrong.

"We'll have to, obviously, investigate what happened here," he told Seven Days on December 15, a week after Kenneth Johnson died in a prison infirmary, pleading for medical attention.

On Friday, Smith and interim Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker acknowledged that the Department of Corrections had failed to conduct an administrative review of the incident required by the department's own policy.

"There wasn't one," Smith said at a press conference in Montpelier. "And there should have been." In an interview later Friday, he vowed to ensure that such a lapse wouldn't happen again. "From now on, we're going to do one every time there is a death or injury in our facility," the secretary said.

Vermont's Office of the Defender General has concluded that the Department of Corrections and its former medical contractor ignored a dying prisoner's pleas for help and, rather than save his life, threatened him for seeking medical attention.

In a blistering report, a portion of which was released this week, the office accused Corrections of being "complicit in covering up its contractor's gross failure to provide live-saving medical care" in the December 2019 incident. The report alleges that nurses failed to check on the prisoner and that a staffer wrote in a medical log that he was awake when he had, in fact, already died.

"He died after hours of struggling to breathe while nearby nurses did nothing to help," the report reads.

In an interview, Defender General Matthew Valerio also alleged that the prisoner, Kenneth Johnson, may have received substandard care because he was Black. "You can never know what's in another man's heart or mind when they're making decisions, but this clearly calls into question whether or not there was a racial component to the lack of treatment that Mr. Johnson received," Valerio said.

Seven Days first reported last December that Johnson spent his final hours in the infirmary of Newport's Northern State Correctional Facility gasping for air and begging for help. The story quoted a fellow inmate, Raymond Gadreault, who said he witnessed the incident and alerted authorities to Johnson's death in the early morning hours of December 7.

"He kept banging on the window for the nurse to do something about it — and they didn't," Gadreault said at the time.

A white man faces criminal charges for unleashing what was described as a racist tirade against a white Winooski woman and her biracial daughter as they left the city's post office last week.

The Chittenden County State's Attorney's Office accused Don Lindsay, 66, of Winooski, of disorderly conduct with a hate-crime enhancement. He pleaded not guilty during a June 30 arraignment, but police said he admitted to saying "some nasty things."

"I don't like Blacks I'm sorry I am prejudice but I don't care," he allegedly told Winooski Officer Jason Ziter, according to a court affidavit.

Lindsay explained to Ziter that he had lost his patience at how long Megan Gregory, 31, spent inside the Winooski Post Office on Main Street, where COVID-19 restrictions allow just one customer at a time inside the lobby.

A shackled teenager "did not appear to be resisting" when former St. Albans police officer Joel Daugreilh used pepper spray on him inside a holding cell, a state police investigator concluded. 

Daugreilh, 34, pleaded not guilty Tuesday to a misdemeanor count of simple assault. He was charged Monday, the result of an about-face by Vermont Attorney General T. J. Donovan, who had previously declined to bring charges for Daugreilh's November 2017 conduct. 
A police affidavit filed in state court reveals new details about the mysterious case. Daugreilh resigned from the St. Albans Police Department during an internal investigation into whether he used excessive force, but the episode was not made public for more than two years. It came to light shortly after another former St. Albans cop, Sgt. Jason Lawton, was charged in September 2019 with assaulting a shackled detainee in a department holding cell.
When Vermont Public Radio sought records from the Daugreilh investigation, Donovan instead reopened the case, telling the news outlet in January that he'd discovered "new information." The footage has yet to be publicly released.

Multiple cameras captured the encounter between Daugreilh and 18-year-old Nathan Willey, according to a state trooper who reviewed the tape in 2017 and described the contents in a criminal affidavit.

Updated on June 30, 2020.

The Vermont Attorney General's Office on Monday charged a former St. Albans police officer with assault for pepper-spraying a handcuffed man in a holding cell in 2017.

Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan initially declined to prosecute former corporal Joel Daugreilh in 2018, but he reopened the case in January when Vermont Public Radio requested video of the incident.

By that time, St. Albans police were facing public scrutiny over a different case in which a former sergeant, Jason Lawton, punched a handcuffed woman in a holding cell. Donovan's office charged Lawton with assault in November 2019. That case is pending.  Daugreilh resigned from the St. Albans force during an internal investigation into the pepper-spraying incident. Faced with a request for public records about the case from VPR, Donovan told the news outlet that he'd discovered "new information" about the incident and would hire a use-of-force expert to review it.

A Black man who claimed Bennington police racially profiled him has settled with the town for $30,000, the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont said Wednesday.

Police were looking for a drug dealer in July 2013 when an undercover officer spotted Shamel Alexander riding in the backseat of a New York taxi. Officer Andy Hunt pulled over the cabbie and eventually questioned Alexander. Alexander was not the dealer police were seeking, but, after searching his bag, the officer found $1,500 worth of heroin.
Alexander was later convicted and sentenced by a state judge to 10 years in prison, despite having no criminal history. He appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court, which vacated the conviction in 2016 on the grounds that police had no lawful basis to stop Alexander.
Alexander also sued the Town of Bennington for civil rights violations, claiming his arrest was part of a pattern of racial profiling by the Bennington Police Department.

Bennington twice tried unsuccessfully to get the case dismissed before agreeing to settle, the ACLU said.

"Our client is grateful to have this case resolved, having shined a spotlight on system-wide discriminatory police practices in Bennington," staff attorney Lia Ernst said in a press release. "This settlement does not alleviate the need for top-to-bottom changes to a deeply troubled police department and to a municipal leadership that continues to deny there is even a problem with unconstitutional police practices in Bennington."

Town Manager Stuart Hurd said the municipality did not admit liability as part of the settlement. "This has been pending for four years," he wrote in an email. "All parties agreed it’s best to avoid further long and protracted litigation."
A 2017 study by University of Vermont economics professor Stephanie Seguino found that Bennington police stopped Black drivers at more than double the rate of white drivers. It was one of the worst racial disparities in the state, the researchers found. The study was cited as part of Alexander's civil rights lawsuit and criticized by the Town of Bennington as "seriously flawed."

A 2019 study by the Montpelier-based Crime Research Group was also highly critical of Seguino's earlier work. Its analysis found no racial disparities in traffic stops by Bennington police.
Earlier this year, an outside report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police critiqued the Bennington department for a "warrior" culture and found many residents didn't trust its officers.

The town selectboard commissioned the review in wake of criticism that police mishandled harassment allegations reported by former state representative Kiah Morris. Morris, the only woman of color in the legislature at the time, cited racist harassment in later resigning her seat.