Mobile phone carriers are turning over mountains of cell phone tracking data to assist police in criminal investigations — all without a warrant, and all without customers having any idea that they’re being tailed.

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Senators met in a rare Monday session this week, but they didn’t take up take up a proposal to give police access to prescription drug database reports without first obtaining a warrant. The proposal would be attached as an amendment to H. 745, the prescription drug database bill. The Senate next meets Tuesday at 3 p.m. Predicting when specific bills will be taken up has become difficult. Progress through the items on the calendar has been in a somewhat non-linear fashion, with some items remaining high on the calendar but repeatedly passed over. To complicate things further, the calendar is about to expand by hundreds of more pages as the Senate begins review of the state budget, traditionally one of the last bills approved before adjournment.

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When the Vt. Senate takes up a bill this week proposing changes to the state’s prescription drug database, the Judiciary Committee will propose that police be allowed to obtain information from the database without a warrant. The proposal was unveiled last week after the full committee met with Gov. Peter Shumlin in a special conference at his statehouse office. The governor has been advocating that the database — created in 2006 as a health database to provide help for people facing drug abuse problems — now also serve as a law enforcement tool. (more…)

A key vote is coming up Wednesday in the Vt. Senate Judiciary Committee on whether police can access Vermonters’ prescription drug records (Schedule II-IV drugs) without a warrant. The Shumlin administration has been pushing hard for warrantless access. The governor thinks an “epidemic” of prescription drug abuse demands an end-run around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. He lost his bid in the House when the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System (VPMS) bill, H. 745, went through there. But he’s lobbying hard in the Senate so police can look at the prescriptions Vermonters receive from their doctors, with no judge needing to grant permission before they do so.

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The Vermont Supreme Court has added another opinion to its list of recent decisions interpreting which police records can be kept secret. The latest decision is complicated and murky in places, reflecting the general state of the state’s public records law. And while the decision suggests that more records of internal investigations by local and county police agencies could come into public view, the court reiterated its dictum of the week before that once a police record is deemed a criminal investigation record, it’s gone from public sight forever.

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The Vermont Supreme Court ruled Friday that the public’s right to access police investigation records is nil. Sure, we might hear about police helping to rescue a cat high in a tree. But if an off-duty police officer drives drunk, gets stopped, but isn’t charged, the public doesn’t have a right to examine the records to determine why.

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State Attorney General William Sorrell is continuing his firm resistance to releasing police investigation records despite a recent ruling from the Vermont Supreme Court suggesting not all investigation records can be withheld from the public. Sorrell has told the Valley News that the White River Junction-based paper can’t have records of an investigation into possible brutality by Hartford police in a 2010 incident.

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What happens when a public official insists a government meeting start with a prayer? If it’s the U.S., it’ll likely be challenged in court (as with the ACLU-VT’s challenge to prayer at the yearly town meeting in Franklin). Americans enjoy constitutional safeguards that protect individual expression while prohibiting state endorsement. But imagine the same scenario in a country that has an official religion, yet few people are religious. Is prayer at the public meeting permissible? (more…)

For the first time in 10 years, Marilyn Hackett was not subjected to listening to a Christian prayer while attending the Franklin town meeting. On Tuesday, the moderator of the meeting announced that due to the pending litigation against the town, the town’s legal counsel had advised no prayer be said this year. The meeting then began as other town meetings in the state begin — getting down to the town’s business.

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The Vermont Supreme Court has reversed a trial court decision barring a Windham County man from obtaining routine police records. The decision makes clear that police agencies are not exempt from the state’s Access to Public Records Act and that they should follow a general standard of disclosing a record unless harm can be shown.

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