Court sides with convicted rapist

1-9-16 Vermont:

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — The Vermont Supreme Court sided with a convicted rapist when it announced Friday that Vermont will immediately adopt the so-called “prison mailbox rule,” which is already used by a host of other states and the federal courts.

Joseph Bruyette has spent decades filing appeals and motions from his jail cell.

The rule only applies to prisoners who do not have lawyers, and it requires courts to use the day those prisoners hand over legal notices to prison staff members to be mailed to the court as the official date they are considered “filed” for legal purposes.

Without such a rule, a prisoner could write out a notice of appeal, for instance, before what is typically a 30-day statutory period and not learn until after the due date had passed that the jail hadn’t gotten around to sending the form along, a situation which could trigger the court into automatically dismissing the appeal for lack of a “timely” response.

Bruyette had exactly that happen to his most recent appeal when it finally arrived in the mail at the Vermont Supreme Court clerk’s office. Bruyette is serving a 45- to 85-year sentence in Michigan for a 1990 conviction in a brutal rape that took place three years earlier in Rutland.

Undaunted by the failure of his appeal, Bruyette filed a motion arguing that because he was locked up (at the time in a Kentucky prison), and did not have a lawyer to keep track things on his behalf, his good-faith effort to hand over his appeal notice to prison staff for mailing should have served as the benchmark date used by the court.

In the six-page ruling released Friday, Vermont’s justices let the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already adopted the mail box rule for federal prisoners, do the talking, quoting from their decision which began, “The situation of prisoners seeking to appeal without the aid of counsel is unique … (those) prisoners cannot personally travel to the courthouse to see that the notice is stamped ‘filed,’” and often they cannot call before a deadline to see if the papers have arrived.

With the help of legal briefs filed in support of his position by the Vermont defender general’s office and Vermont’s prisoner’s rights office, Bruyette successfully argued that because the “vagaries of the mail” within the jail system and at the post office were out of his hands, he was put at an unfair disadvantage compared to those prisoners who do have lawyers.

“It’s about how you count the days (and) this just brings Vermont into line with pretty much the rest of the country,” Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio said Friday after the announcement that Bruyette had prevailed. “It recognizes that prisoners have difficulties getting access to the courts.”

“The importance of this decision doesn’t really have to do with (Bruyette’s) case. It has to do with the general establishment of this rule,” Valerio said. “We thought it was important to weigh in on this because it has a global impact on inmates.” ..Source.. by Times Argus