Windsor Superior Court Judge H. Dickson Corbett issued a ruling this month preventing the Village of Woodstock from hiring a new police chief.
In his Aug. 7 ruling, Corbett signaled that the court likely will ultimately rule in favor of the former police chief, Joe Swanson, in his legal action against the village. A separate $5 million civil lawsuit against the village is still pending.
Swanson sued the village in early May after the municipal manager, Eric Duffy, and the Board of Village Trustees demoted Swanson from police chief to police officer. At the heart of his lawsuit, Swanson claimed that village trustees did not follow state law, by establishing proper cause, when they removed him from office.
When Swanson filed the suit, he also asked the court to step in and offer a preliminary injunction, an intervention that would stop the village from hiring a new chief pending future court orders.
To grant Swanson’s request to step in, the court needed evidence that Woodstock’s hiring of a new police chief would cause Swanson irreparable harm — and Corbett reasoned the case met that threshold. Chris O’Keefe has been serving as interim chief and can remain in that post, according to the decision.
In his reasoning, Corbett signaled that the court will likely rule in Swanson’s favor down the line.
“It appears that the village trustees failed to apply the correct legal standard before removing petitioner (Swanson) from the office of police chief,” Corbett wrote in the injunction ruling.
While the injunction did not decide the merits or final outcome of the case, it did offer a prediction based on the court’s review of evidence submitted with the request for injunction, Corbett wrote.
“It appears from that review that the decision of the trustees will be reversed because the trustees did not apply the correct legal standard when making their decision,” he wrote.
Linda Fraas, Swanson’s attorney, said the ruling was a “very promising sign.”
The saga started in October after Swanson’s husband got into a verbal altercation with another driver during a traffic incident while Swanson was a passenger in the car. A citizen complaint was filed against Swanson regarding the incident.
Two separate investigations following the incident found that Swanson did not commit wrongdoing. One of those investigations was conducted by the Vermont State Police and the other was by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, according to court documents.
Duffy also hired a private investigator to interview police department employees about Swanson’s conduct, said Jeffrey Kahn, vice chair of the Board of Village Trustees. Duffy declined to comment on the case.
After those interviews, Duffy decided to demote Swanson to police officer. Then, the trustees had a quasi judicial hearing to decide if they would support that decision. The hearing, made public per Swanson’s request, went on for more than 14 hours.
During that hearing, “there was a preponderance of testimony by both police officers as well as dispatchers that it became clear that the chief did not have support within either department,” Khan said.
Without that support, the trustees reasoned it was best for the community to remove Swanson as chief, Khan said.
“The trustees’ interest throughout this has been what’s in the best interest of the municipality,” he said.
Vermont law offers certain tenure protections to police chiefs — and the village has to meet certain criteria to remove them from office, Corbett wrote. In line with past interpretations of the law, the village would have to prove Swanson was “negligent or derelict” in his duties, engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer” or was otherwise unable to perform his job, Corbett wrote.
The trustees reasoned they didn’t need to meet that criteria because they weren’t firing Swanson altogether, they were merely demoting him.
But chiefs hold a distinct rank, Corbett wrote, and removing anyone from that position requires that the village meet the legal criteria.
“It validates what we’ve been saying all along, that this process was not correct,” said Fraas, Swanson’s attorney.
Despite the court’s injunction, and the village’s subsequent inability to hire a new chief, the department is running smoothly with O’Keefe in the interim job, Khan said.
Corbett wrote that from his review of evidence submitted with the injunction, the case will likely be passed back down to the board of trustees. At that point, trustees would decide whether to remove Swanson as chief, within the bounds of state law.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated when Eric Duffy hired a private investigator and improperly described Swanson’s two legal actions against the Village of Woodstock. It also contained a photo caption that gave an outdated employment status for Joe Swanson.
