Date of Offense
Offense(s)
Reporting Authority
Supporting Document(s)
Statement
I submit this complaint regarding State’s Attorney Sean Dillon’s handling of the legal classification of 13 V.S.A. § 3002, impersonation of officer, in my matter. My complaint is that Attorney Dillon advanced, endorsed, or relied upon a predicate-offense characterization that was legally unsound, materially misleading, and inconsistent with the actual statutory text and the record-based distinctions preserved in my case materials. Vermont’s impersonation-of-officer statute establishes a first-offense penalty and a second-or-subsequent-offense penalty structure, but the statute itself does not label the offense a “predicate offense.”
My legal dissertation and related memorandum analyze this issue directly. That work explains that the contemporaneous record preserved a mixed punitive-restorative sequence, while later judicial treatment compressed that fuller record into a narrower predicate-style characterization that did not appear as a contemporaneous classification in the original disposition. The dissertation further states that later treatment “narrowed that sequence into a predicate-style characterization” and that the study’s central legal issue was whether the original record supported that later label at all.
The current Vermont sealing statute also matters. Under current 13 V.S.A. § 7601, “qualifying crime” broadly includes misdemeanor offenses except specified exclusions, and the current statute does not exclude impersonation of officer by naming 13 V.S.A. § 3002 among those misdemeanor exclusions. My dissertation likewise explains that the present statutory framework requires renewed attention to current law rather than repetition of older predicate-style shorthand, and that current Chapter 230 analysis no longer rests on the same predicate-offense logic used in earlier denials.
Accordingly, my complaint is not merely that Attorney Dillon took an adverse position against me. My complaint is that he advanced or persisted in a materially incorrect legal characterization of § 3002 and of my record, despite the distinction between a repeat-offense penalty structure and a proper predicate-offense classification, and despite the change in Vermont’s current Chapter 230 framework. That kind of conduct raises concerns about competence, candor, and fairness because it risks misleading the tribunal and distorting the legal status of a criminal record in a way that materially affects access to sealing relief. The Professional Responsibility Board reviews complaints alleging violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct, and I am asking that this conduct be reviewed under that framework.
