Court restructuring fails to create a unified superior court. Cracks in the system. After a person turns 18, neither the family nor criminal division had jurisdiction to prosecute felonies committed before the person turned 14.

In re D.K., Juvenile, 

2012 VT 23 (Johnson, J.) (Dooley,  J. concurring) (Skoglund, J., joined by Chief Justice Reiber, dissenting)

The issue in this case is whether the State may prosecute an adult defendant for sexual assaults alleged to have occurred when he was a child between the ages of eleven and thirteen. The prosecution was delayed because the alleged victims did not come forward until defendant was eighteen years of age. The State filed the information in the criminal division. The criminal division transferred the case to the family division. The family division dismissed because defendant had reached age eighteen. We affirm.

Given the applicable law and the circumstances of this case, neither the family nor criminal division had jurisdiction to prosecute adults who committed delinquent acts as children under the age of fourteen. It is impossible to know whether this was a legislative oversight during the judicial restructuring, or an intentional policy decision. We will not create jurisdiction where it did not exist to cover this perceived “gap,” which has since been addressed by the Legislature. Accordingly, the family division acted properly in dismissing the charges.

Dooley, J. concurs fully in the Court’s decision and writes to urge the Legislature to revisit the recent judicial branch restructuring legislation. It is hard to read the decision in this case without concluding that we have invented a case processing machine so complicated that we cannot easily control its operating rules. Restructuring created the opportunity to eliminate this complication. Since the family court and district court were merged into the superior court, it should have become possible to avoid transferring cases between courts and to get to the heart of the matter in one proceeding. Unfortunately, that did not happen because the jurisdictional walls between the components of the new superior court continued and cases must, accordingly, be transferred between divisions of the superior court by the same formal process that existed in the past, even though, as we move to electronic records, the symbolic physical transfer of the case disappears.

Cases continue to fall through the cracks just as they did before. We have perpetuated a system that is ruled by what hat the judge is wearing, and nothing more. If the judge fails to change hats properly, or no hat is available for the action sought, as here, the purposes of the statutory scheme are frustrated.

We can solve this problem by allowing any case to be filed in any division or no division of the superior court, and then treating the filing point as a doorway into a proceeding that will evaluate the circumstances and determine how best to handle it with all relevant options available. In other words, we could have judges wearing no hats with the ability to conduct the proceeding as if he or she was wearing all possible hats.

I urge the Legislature to review the remaining jurisdictional walls between the components of the superior court and remove them not only for cases like this, but in all cases filed in superior court, in order to allow the most expeditious route to a just result.

Skoglund, J. joined by Chief Justice Reiber, agree that the family division lacked jurisdiction and properly dismissed the charges, but would hold that a case could be brought in the criminal division of the superior court, to which the Legislature has granted jurisdiction “to try, render judgment, and pass sentence in prosecutions for felonies and misdemeanors.” 4 V.S.A. § 32(a).