The hearing was meant to determine whether the state had enough evidence to support a charge of attempted murder. Subpoenas had been issued and witnesses were prepared to testify. But when the defendant was escorted into the Chittenden County courtroom on Monday morning, there was an obvious problem.
“Judge, this isn’t my client,” a puzzled Amy Davis said. The defense attorney had spent two hours in prison last week meeting with her real client, Nazareth Gonzalez. The 23-year-old Winooski resident looked nothing like the man who now stood beside her.
“All right — we are here in the matter of, uh, State v. Gonzalez, or State v. Nazareth,” Judge Tim Doherty said. “Who do we have here?”
“I don’t know,” Davis said.
Recognizing that the man did not speak English, Doherty, who taught English as a second language in New York City for a few years before attending law school, drew on his limited Spanish vocabulary.
“¿Solamente español?” Doherty asked.
“Si,” the man replied.
“¿Cómo se llama?”
“Erlin Gonzalez.”
“All right,” the judge said, sounding unsure of what to do next. “So, it sounds like we have a different Gonzalez.”
Indeed. The right Gonzalez was still at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, 45 minutes away. The hearing would need to be postponed.
It was a classic case of mistaken identity, but one with serious consequences.
Nazareth Gonzalez missed an important court date that extended his time behind bars in a case that has yet to be resolved. Erlin Gonzalez-Orozco, meanwhile, was driven to court without explanation — and was provided no interpreter as he appeared before a judge for a crime he didn’t commit. Valuable time was wasted, both for the backlogged court system and for the attorneys, detectives and witnesses, who will all need to come back in three weeks’ time, the earliest available date to reschedule the hearing.
More broadly, the error demonstrated the struggles Vermont prisons are having in dealing with the increasing number of non-English speakers landing on their doorstep amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. State data show that Vermont has been holding about 20 federal detainees each day for the past three months, compared to about five over the same time frame in 2023.
A citizen of Guatemala, Erlin Gonzalez-Orozco was arrested late last month after an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol officer who was out on a jog saw him and several other people hiding in the woods near the Canadian border. According to court documents, Gonzalez-Orozco told border patrol officers that he had recently arrived in Canada for a job on a vegetable farm but left after his bosses forced him to work while sick. He admitted to crossing the U.S. border illegally and said his intended destination was Atlanta. A fingerprint check revealed no previous criminal history.
Doherty, who was not yet aware of the reason Gonzalez-Orozco had been detained, said it was “reasonable” to infer that the man had been brought to the courtroom in part because he spoke no English.
“The court finds this extraordinarily unfortunate and concerning,” Doherty said.
Attorneys on both sides of the case shared the judge’s concern. Davis called the mix-up a “blatant form of racism.”
“They just picked a Gonzalez and brought him,” she said in an interview.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said she fears that incidents like this will undermine trust in the legal system, particularly among people of color. “How is it that the wrong person gets taken out of custody and transported to a court hearing without anyone noticing that it is, in fact, not the right person?” she said in an interview on Monday afternoon.
On Tuesday, the Vermont Department of Corrections apologized for the error, which it said appeared to have been a genuine mistake. When someone in prison needs to attend a hearing, there’s a typical procedure: A court staffer emails an order to both the DOC and the local sheriff’s department, which transports prisoners. Those orders land in the inbox of some, but not all, corrections staff.
The booking officer on duty at Northwest on Monday did not receive the email about Nazareth Gonzalez directly, according to DOC spokesperson Haley Sommer. Instead, a colleague told the booking officer that someone with the last name Gonzalez needed to be transported.
“There happened to be two individuals with the last name Gonzalez, and the booking officer brought the wrong one,” Sommer said.
Department protocols require officers to verify full names before transport to avoid these scenarios. But the officer failed to do so, as did the sheriff’s deputy picking up Gonzalez-Orozco, Sommer said. Starting on Tuesday, the DOC will require all transport orders to be sent directly to the booking officer, and shift supervisors must be present every time a prisoner is released, according to Sommer.
The incident comes amid growing concerns over the use of Vermont prisons as holding grounds for immigration detainees. The state has an agreement with the feds that allows them to hold these detainees at its six prisons for a fee of $180 per person per day.
Some of those kept in Vermont prisons were arrested well outside of the state, such as Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard researcher who was taken into custody by customs officials in February for failing to declare samples of frog embryos at a Boston airport. Petrova spent a week in a Vermont prison before she was shuttled to a Louisiana detention facility.
The speed at which detainees get booked and transferred has led to confusion at times. In May, immigration attorney Brett Stokes arrived at Northwest in hopes of speaking to 10 migrant workers who had been arrested during a worksite raid in Newport. He was brought into a room full of people, only to learn that they weren’t his clients but rather people who had been detained in Massachusetts days earlier.
The strain is getting to those who operate Vermont prisons, VTDigger reported last month. Through a public records request, the news outlet received emails written by Greg Hale, who runs the St. Albans prison, in which he complained about the flow of ICE prisoners in and out of his facility. The warden’s concerns grew in March after ICE made two substantial transfers into Northwest, which he said was pushing his staff to their limit.
“Booking is swamped and we are going to miss something critical,” Hale wrote, according to VTDigger.
Once the mistake became clear on Monday morning, Judge Doherty apologized to Gonzalez-Orozco in Spanish, then switched to English to say, “You’re here for the wrong case.”
As the sheriff’s deputies prepared to escort him out of the courtroom, Gonzalez-Orozco turned to Davis, who tried to explain that he was going to be brought back to jail. He responded in Spanish that he did not understand what she was saying.
“I know. I’m sorry,” the attorney said, moments before he was whisked away. “I’m sorry.”