Vermont Supreme Court diversity, equity, and inclusion forum comes to Rutland

The next forum is at 4 p.m. March 28 at the Lamoille County Courthouse, 154 Main St., Hyde Park.

On Thursday, at the Rutland County Courthouse, the question of racial and ethnic data was posed.

“My responsibility has been collecting data,” said Associate Justice William Cohen. “And it’s important to make decisions, but in order to make important decisions we have to get accurate data from individuals on race and ethnicity, and it’s not nearly as easy or straightforward as we had anticipated.”

He said there are two main ways that racial and ethnic data is collected by the police and courts. One is when people self-report, which is the preferred way, the other is when someone in the court makes an observation about a person’s race or ethnic background.

Cohen said that many people are not comfortable telling the court their race or ethnicity, so they check the box that says they prefer not to answer, leaving the system to its own observations.

He noted that having police ask people their race or ethnicity at a traffic stop or similar situation has raised concerns.

Xusana Davis, executive director of the Vermont Office of Racial Equity, attended the forum remotely and talked about the need for, and limitations of, such data gathering.

“It’s important to us in institutions to be able to collect these data because there’s no way for us to measure disparity or discrimination if we’re not able to know who’s being discriminated against, and what are the patterns that we’re seeing,” she said. “At the same time … it’s really difficult to tell people, ‘No, no, no, don’t worry about all the genocide and stuff, you can trust us this time.’”

She noted reports from as recently as 2020 about migrant women at the southern U.S. border being given unnecessary hysterectomies without their consent, and said that a great deal of trust needs to be built and rebuilt between marginalized people and institutions.

Self-reported racial and ethnic data is good for accuracy’s sake, she said, but observed data has its uses as well, since how a person’s and ethnicity is perceived is often what determines how they are treated.

“What I actually am is one thing, what you think I am is going to impact how you treat me,” she said.

Chief Justice Paul Reiber said that by the end of the year the plan is to deliver a report based on these forums to the Supreme Court with recommendations for action. He believes one recommendation will be that the court makes forums like these a regular occurrence.

Rutland-area businessman Al Wakefield asked the justices what they’d learned so far from their other meetings.

Reiber said a few things that come to mind are how comfortable people from marginalized groups feel about entering a courthouse, how the system treats people of limited economic means at a disadvantage, and how some things like jury orientation videos, while not overtly problematic, could stand to be updated.

Chrispin White, member services and events manager at the Chamber & Economic Development of the Rutland Region (CEDRR) asked whether the justices could elaborate more on people’s feelings towards entering a courthouse, given these forums are being held mainly in such places.

Reiber said that the first two were held in non-courthouse spaces, but the folks in charge of keeping the justices safe had issues with this and the justices didn’t wish to second-guess them.

Scott Griffith, chief of planning and court services at Vermont Judiciary, said another reason is that the courthouses, since the pandemic, are all equipped with fairly robust remote-meeting technology, which allows people to participate in that fashion much better.

keith.whitcomb

@rutlandherald.com