Friday, August 7, 2020
Interim Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker has previously said the outbreak had eroded his trust in CoreCivic, the private company that runs the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Miss., where 219 Vermont inmates are housed.
But, on Friday, Baker said he got reassuring word from two Vermont Department of Corrections officials sent to Mississippi.
“My trust level is rising,” Baker said during a press conference on Friday.
That trust was shaken over the weekend after 86 inmates tested positive for the virus. Additional results raised that number to 146.
Tags: CoreCivic , prison , coronavirus , COVID-19 , out-of-state inmates , Web Only , Image
A candidate running to represent Winooski in the Vermont House is in legal trouble following his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence last month.
Jordan Matte, 32, had a court date on Thursday for a civil license suspension tied to his July 19 arrest in Winooski. Matte, the husband of Winooski Mayor Kristine Lott, is one of three candidates on the ballot in the August 11 Democratic primary.
He’s vying for one of two seats representing the Chittenden 6-7 district, which includes Winooski and a small part of northeast Burlington.
The other two primary candidates are incumbent Hal Colston (D-Winooski) and Taylor Small, the director of health and wellness at the Pride Center of Vermont in Burlington. Diana Gonzalez (P-Winooski) opted not to run for reelection.
Tags: DUI , Winooski , Jordan Matte , House of Representative , Sarah George , Web Only , Image
Thursday, August 6, 2020
"There's an element of thought inside Corrections that the people that come into our custody somehow don't deserve the respect and dignity that all human beings deserve," Baker told members of the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee. "That culture needs to change."
The commissioner was referring specifically to the death last December of Kenneth Johnson, a Black inmate who died of a misdiagnosed and untreated tumor at a northern Vermont prison. Multiple reports have found that Corrections staff and medical contractors ignored Johnson's pleas for help in the hours before he died, and the state's chief medical examiner said the incident could constitute criminal neglect.
"This was unacceptable and avoidable," Baker said. He told committee members that he had recently learned that 45 Vermont inmates had died in state custody in the past decade and that his department had not complied with a 2006 policy requiring an administrative review after each death.
"That is the cultural [problem] that I'm talking about," he said. "I was lost for words when I found out that [there were] 45 deaths in 10 years and our policy is 14 years old. Unacceptable. Unacceptable."
Tags: Kenneth Johnson , Jim Baker , Matthew Valerio , Steve Howard , Dick Sears , Mary Hooper , Web Only , Image
Thursday, July 30, 2020
The prisoners were transported by van to Rutland's Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility on July 28 and were immediately quarantined and tested for the novel coronavirus, the department said. They remain in medical isolation.
According to the department's website, 219 of Vermont's 1,405 prisoners are currently housed at Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, a private prison owned by CoreCivic and located in Tutwiler, Miss. Another Vermont inmate who lived in the same unit as three of the six infected prisoners and who remains in Mississippi also tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this week, the department said. It has called on Tallahatchie to test all Vermont prisoners remaining at the facility.
In a written statement, interim Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker noted that his department had mitigated previous outbreaks in Vermont facilities.
“What we know is our efforts have effectively eliminated the presence of COVID inside Vermont facilities, and if the virus enters it will be from outside our walls,” Baker said. “What we hope is that the Vermont model of mitigation works in this situation."
Prior to the arrival of the Mississippi inmates, 48 in-state prisoners had tested positive for COVID-19 in recent months, as had 20 Corrections staff members.
Tags: Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility , Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility , Jim Baker , Web Only , Image
Friday, July 24, 2020
"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.
Tags: Kenneth Johnson , Mike Smith , Phil Scott , Jim Baker , Matthew Valerio , Web Only , Image
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
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.
Tags: Kenneth Johnson , Matthew Valerio , Jim Baker , Ed Paquin , Web Only , Image
Monday, July 13, 2020
That is the assessment of interim Corrections Commissioner Jim Baker, who said on Monday that multiple investigations into last year's death of inmate Kenneth Johnson have revealed significant failures within the state prison medical system, ranging from a failure to diagnose tumors blocking Johnson's airways to an apparent disregard among nursing staff for his life-threatening symptoms.
"Mr. Johnson repeatedly told staff that he could not breathe," Baker said. "I don't know why the reaction was not different."
"I have not read all the reports yet, but I've been briefed, and I've been briefed enough to know that no one should die in our custody the way that Mr. Johnson passed away," Baker said at a virtual press conference announcing that the department has hired a new health care contractor. "The failure for our medical providers, and health care providers outside the facility, not [to] have diagnosed Mr. Johnson's situation cost him his life on our watch."
Tags: prison , Vermont , VitalCore , Jim Baker , Web Only , Image
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
"My opinion at the time is the same as it is now," Drew Bloom, director of administration at the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, said Wednesday. "I thought the use of force was sketchy."
Attorney General T.J. Donovan has pointed to earlier statements attributed to Bloom to explain why he didn't prosecute Daugreilh when his office first considered the case in 2018. Donovan said he personally believed Daugreilh's actions were "pretty egregious" but didn't press charges because the police expert he tapped — Bloom — had determined they were "reasonable."
Donovan reopened the case earlier this year after Vermont Public Radio sought documents and video related to the investigation. On Monday, the AG charged Daugreilh, who is no longer on the St. Albans force, with misdemeanor assault. In interviews this week, Donovan explained the reversal by saying "new information," not politics, guided his decision.
Tags: T.J. Donovan , attorney general , St. Albans , charges , Joel Daugreilh , Web Only , Image
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
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.
Tags: Joel Daugreilh , T.J. Donovan , excessive force , police brutality , St. Albans Police Department , Web Only , Image
The resolution, which also includes a wide range of police reforms, was sponsored by nine councilors, all of whom voted to approve it; only councilors Ali Dieng (I-Ward 7), Chip Mason (D-Ward 5) and Joan Shannon (D-South District) voted no.
It's unclear what impact, if any, the resolution will have on the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins Wednesday. During a Board of Finance meeting on Monday, Mayor Miro Weinberger said the city doesn't know when officers will leave or retire, which makes it difficult to calculate how much the police budget would be reduced in the next year.
"It is possible there will be savings beyond the cuts already assumed in the budget, but I don't believe those cuts are bankable as of tonight," he said.
Given that the discussion surrounding the resolution went until 1:45 a.m., councilors agreed to postpone a vote on the mayor's budget until Tuesday at 5:30 p.m.
The vote is the culmination of weeks of activism calling for police reform. Hundreds of people had called in to recent public meetings to demand that the city cut police spending in favor of social services. The Burlington protests and speak-outs were sparked by the death of George Floyd — a Black man who was killed by Minneapolis police in May — and by Queen City cops' own violent interactions with young Black men.
Introduced by Councilor Zoraya Hightower (P-Ward 1), the resolution was driven by the advocacy of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, a group led by people of color who have demanded that the city cut the department's maximum police force by about 30 percent, or about 30 officers. The alliance had asked for an immediate cut, whereas the resolution passed early Tuesday achieves the goal over time.
"The past few weeks have reminded, or in some cases taught us, to reexamine our own biases and privilege and be as brave as this moment calls for," Hightower said. "The resolution has flaws — one of them being that we are still overfocused on police reform rather than holistically addressing systemic racism ... but I think we have a solid plan for moving forward."
Tags: Burlington City Council , Mayor Miro Weinberger , budget , FY21 , policing , Burlington Police Department , Web Only , Image