Justia Vermont Supreme Court Opinion Summaries

In dividing the divorcing parties’ assets, a Massachusetts court ordered a special master to sell the Vermont property. After the sale, plaintiff filed an action in a Vermont superior court to rescind the sale and quiet title to the property. Applying the doctrine of comity, the civil division dismissed his action, deferring to the ongoing proceeding in Massachusetts. Plaintiff appealed, arguing that the Vermont court should not have dismissed his suit on comity grounds because the Massachusetts court lacked jurisdiction to order the special master to sell the property. The Vermont Supreme Court concluded the Vermont court acted within its discretion and affirmed. View "Nijensohn v. Ring" on Justia Law

In an interlocutory appeal, the issue presented for the Vermont Supreme Court's review was whether the superior court erred by denying the State’s request to order a psychiatric evaluation of defendant Brent Boyajian before holding a competency hearing. In November 2019, the State charged defendant with burglary of an occupied dwelling, misdemeanor possession of stolen property, and simple assault of a protected professional. Defendant subsequently filed a motion to suppress evidence but asked the court to delay holding a hearing on the motion to allow defense counsel time to determine defendant’s competency to stand trial, indicating that he planned to hire an expert. At a status conference, defense counsel explained that defendant was raising the issue of competency because he had a significant traumatic brain injury and recently suffered an aneurysm. For this reason, counsel noted that defendant was being evaluated by a medical provider with a memory clinic that could perform neurological testing. The experts’ report concluded that “although [defendant] has many specific capacities necessary for adjudicative competence, his limitations in verbal memory and other aspects of cognitive processing are likely to create significant problems effectively communicating with counsel and assisting in his defense.” The experts opined that defendant was therefore not competent to stand trial. The State then filed its own motion for psychiatric evaluation, contending the court should not rely only on defendant's evaluation to determine competency. The court denied the State's request. On appeal to the Supreme Court, the State contended that 13 V.S.A. 4817(b) required the trial court to order an evaluation before holding a competency hearing when the court has reason to believe that a defendant may be incompetent due to mental disease or defect, and an evaluation by a defense-retained expert did not satisfy this requirement. To this the Supreme Court agreed, and therefore reversed and remanded for further proceedings. View "Vermont v. Boyajian" on Justia Law

In October 2017, plaintiffs Sadie Boyd (a student at Twin Valley Middle High School in Whitingham, Vermont) Madeleine Klein (a resident and property owner in Whitingham), and the Town of Whitingham filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief against defendant State of Vermont, arguing that the education funding and property taxation system set forth in 16 V.S.A. ch. 133 and 32 V.S.A. ch. 135 violated the Education Clause, the Proportional Contribution Clause, and the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution. They claimed that the system was unconstitutional because it deprived plaintiff Boyd of an equal educational opportunity, required plaintiff Klein to contribute disproportionately to education funding, and compelled the Town to collect an unconstitutional tax. The civil division granted the State’s motion for summary judgment, concluding that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the alleged inequities were caused by the statutes in question or that the education property taxation system lacked a rational basis. Finding no reversible error, the Vermont Supreme Court affirmed. View "Boyd, et al. v. Vermont" on Justia Law

The Town of Sheldon appealed a hearing officer’s valuation of the subject property, a hydroelectric generating facility, as of April 1, 2019. It challenged the hearing officer’s application of the Income Approach to determine the property’s fair market value and his rejection of the Town’s Direct Sale Comparison approach. The Town essentially argued that the hearing officer’s findings were insufficient to support his conclusions. Finding no reversible error, the Vermont Supreme Court affirmed the valuation. View "Missisquoi Assoc. Hydro c/o Enel Green Power v. Town of Sheldon" on Justia Law

In an interlocutory appeal, the issue this case presented for the Vermont Supreme Court's review was whether Vermont or Georgia law applied to a coverage dispute between claimant Bestwall LLC and insurer Ambassador Insurance Company. Bestwall contended that the trial court erred in concluding that Vermont law applied following the special master’s prediction that Georgia courts would adopt the same loss-allocation method as Vermont. But because Georgia law was unsettled on this issue, the Vermont Supreme Court concluded there was no conflict with Vermont law and accordingly, Vermont law applied. The Court therefore affirmed the trial court’s grant of partial summary judgment to Ambassador. View "In re Ambassador Insurance Company (Bestwall LLC, Appellant)" on Justia Law

New England Phoenix Company, Inc. appealed a trial court order denying its motion for a deficiency judgment following a foreclosure decree and an order confirming its purchase of a mortgaged property at a judicial sale. In 2010, Bank of America lent a veterinary hospital business in Grand Isle money. Paws and Laws, LLC owned the hospital’s real property, and Grand Isle Veterinary Hospital, Inc. owned the business assets. The bank lent Paws and Laws and Grand Isle Veterinary Hospital money separately: Paws and Laws' loan was secured by a mortgage on the real property, Grand Isle Veterinary was secured by the business' personal property and assets. In 2012, Paws and Laws violated the terms of the mortgage by conveying the real property by quit claim deed to Grand Isle Veterinary Hospital. In 2014, Grand Isle Veterinary Hospital gave Bank of America a second mortgage on the real property to secure its finance agreement. Soon thereafter the business defaulted on the loans and guarantor abandoned the property. Guarantor’s attempts to sell the property were unsuccessful. Bank of America did not initiate foreclosure proceedings on the loans, and instead, assigned the loans and mortgages to New England Phoenix. New England Phoenix filed this foreclosure action in April 2019. Guarantor did not participate in the proceedings. In late 2019, the trial court entered a default judgment and issued a foreclosure decree by judicial sale. Neither guarantor nor Grand Isle Veterinary redeemed the property, New England Phoenix submitted the winning bid and the judicial sale. In March 2021, the court issued an order confirming the sale and transferring title to the property to New England Phoenix. In a separate order, the court restated a request that New England Phoenix provide a 2010 appraisal before it would rule on the deficiency judgment. New England Phoenix argued, in effect, that the 2010 appraisal was immaterial to the court’s decision, and that in any case, by the time it took an assignment of the loans and mortgages, the property had long been abandoned and contained no business assets. In appealing the trial court's refusal to reconsider the deficiency issue, it argued to the Vermont Supreme Court that the trial court's reasoning for denying relief was made in error. The Supreme Court concurred with New England Phoenix that the trial court abused its discretion by failing to consider factors relevant to Vermont Rule of Civil Procedure 80.1(j)(2), and by exercising its discretion to deny a deficiency judgment “for clearly untenable reasons.” View "New England Phoenix Company, Inc. v. Grand Isle Veterinary Hospital, Inc. et al." on Justia Law

Plaintiff Roger Rodrigue claimed defendant Attorney Vincent Illuzzi negligently advised plaintiff to sign a Vermont workers’ compensation settlement that contained a general release barring recovery otherwise available from the third-party who injured him. Plaintiff appealed the trial court’s dismissal of the entire original complaint for failure to state a claim, grant of summary judgment in favor of defendant on an amended legal-malpractice claim, and denial of plaintiff’s request for findings following summary judgment. Finding no reversible error, the Vermont Supreme Court affirmed. View "Rodrigue v. Illuzzi" on Justia Law

The Vermont Environmental Division concluded that Snowstone, LLC, did not need an Act 250 permit to operate a small dimensional-stone extraction operation on a 0.93-acre parcel of land to be purchased from landowners Justin and Maureen Savage. It found the proposed sale between landowners and Snowstone was an arm’s-length transaction and that neither party would exercise “control” over the land to be held by the other such that they should be considered one “person” for Act 250 purposes. Neighbors challenged these conclusions on appeal, and challenged other aspects of the court’s merits decision as well. Finding no reversible error, the Vermont Supreme Court affirmed the Environmental Division. View "In re Snowstone, LLC Act 250 Jurisdictional Opinion (Michael Harrington, et al., Appellants)" on Justia Law

In January 2018, defendant Scott Vogel was charged with one count of luring a child. According to the charging affidavit, in September 2017, defendant was in an online chatroom dedicated to “daddaughtersex.” He began a chat with a Vermont undercover law enforcement officer who was posing as the mother of two daughters aged seven and thirteen years old. In a series of messages exchanged with the officer, defendant discussed having sex with her two daughters, specifically expressing interest in the thirteen-year-old. He provided details of what sexual acts he would perform with the child and stated that he would bring a special alcoholic punch for the child to drink. The issue this interlocutory appeal presented for the Vermont Supreme Court's review centered on whether a defendant could be tried on a charge of violating 13 V.S.A. 2828, which prohibited solicitation of a child or another person believed to be a child to engage in sexual activity, where the defendant believed that he was communicating with another adult to arrange sexual contact with a minor child but the child turned out to be fictitious. The Supreme Court concluded the facts alleged by the State in this case were sufficient to make out a prima facie case that defendant violated section 2828. The Court therefore affirmed the trial court’s decision denying defendant’s motion to dismiss, and remanded for further proceedings. View "Vermont v. Vogel" on Justia Law

Petitioner Joseph Bruyette appealed an April 2021 Department of Corrections ("DOC") declaratory ruling, made after his case staffing in June 2019, in which the DOC stated that it would “continue to rely on evaluations and reports that refer to [an] expunged offense when assessing [an] individual’s risk to make programming, classification and release decisions.” The DOC further stated in its declaratory ruling that it would also “maintain a record of such evaluations and reports to support its decisions . . . until [the individual in question] ha[s] reached their maximum release date whether or not the offense has been expunged.” Petitioner had several felony convictions expunged prior to reclassifications in June and August 2021, and alleged that the declaratory ruling violated Vermont’s expungement statute, 13 V.S.A. 7606. The State argued petitioner lacked standing to bring this case because it did not rely on petitioner's expunged convictions during his final reclassification in August 2021. The Vermont Supreme Court concluded that because the disputed facts were vital for consideration of petitioner’s standing, it remanded the case for further development of the record. View "In re Joseph Bruyette" on Justia Law