Daniel Seff represented a Vermont municipal police officer in Hubacz v. Village of Waterbury, 2018 VT 37, which the Vermont Supreme Court handed down on April 6, 2018.  In Hubacz, the Court imposed two new limitations on a police department’s ability to terminate an officer in situations where a prosecutor has declined to prosecute that officer’s cases.  First, the Hubacz Court held that “a nonprosecution decision may only serve as the basis for termination for cause where the police department involved cannot reasonably accommodate the effect of the prosecutor’s decision, whether by assigning the officer to alternate duties, ensuring that the officer’s arrests are witnessed, or by some other means.”  And second, the Hubacz decision requires that “a State’s Attorney’s decision not to prosecute a particular police officer’s cases must be premised on valid grounds.”  Referring to the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), attorney Will Aitchison, a leading national commentator on public safety labor and employment law issues and the author of The Rights of Law Enforcement Officers (7th ed. 2015), described Hubacz v. Village of Waterbury in his monthly LRIS podcast as “one of what I think of as the two most important Brady decisions that we’ve seen come down from a court.”