Gov. Phil Scott on Thursday signed legislation clarifying current statute to explicitly allow Vermont police officers to use chokeholds for self-defense and in life-threatening situations.
In 2020, after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, Scott signed a policing reform bill that made it a crime for cops to use certain restraint techniques, such as chokeholds, that can cause injury or death.
The Vermont Department of Public Safety was assigned to put together a training policy for the new use-of-force restrictions and report back to the Legislature.
While working on the policy, law enforcement officials decided to ask legislators to amend the chokehold ban to make it clear that police can use chokeholds to defend themselves in life-and-death situations.
The new bill, H.145, moved swiftly through the Legislature, and Scott was initially expected to sign it.
On Tuesday, however, he sent an urgent letter to legislative leadership expressing a concern with the measure. Scott’s issue was not with the chokehold clarification itself; he wrote that lawmakers had done “an excellent job making the clarifying changes needed regarding law enforcement use of force.”
Instead, the governor was perturbed by a proposed change to the state’s justifiable homicide statute. That law makes clear when an individual can kill or wound a person legally under certain circumstances, including self-defense.
In H.145, the Legislature moved to tweak the statute to try to ensure that it could not be used as a defense in circumstances similar to when two men shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery as he was jogging in Glynn County, Georgia.
Scott asked for the Legislature’s written assurance that the change to the justifiable homicide statute would not make it a crime for citizens to come to the aid of others and defend themselves.
“The result of this change is to potentially make someone into a criminal for stepping up to protect the victim of a violent crime, if they injure or kill the attacker,” Scott wrote in the letter. “If that is the case, the Legislature should act to correct this oversight.”
The Republican governor’s reading of the legislation closely mirrored the National Rifle Association’s opinion of the bill. On May 7, the NRA issued a message to its members calling on Scott to veto the bill over the issue of self-defense.
On Wednesday, Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Committee on Judiciary, and Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, the head of the House Committee on Judiciary, responded to the governor with a letter explaining that H.145 does not eliminate or limit other longstanding laws that protect a person’s right to self-defense or efforts to protect others.
That was apparently enough for Scott, who signed the bill the next day.
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