Bram Kranichfeld thought his time had finally come.
It was winter 2016, and T.J. Donovan, Kranichfeld’s boss in the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office, had just been elected Vermont’s next attorney general. Kranichfeld, then 37, had served under Donovan for the better part of a decade and considered himself a qualified and deserving successor.
The county’s Democratic committee agreed, ranking Kranichfeld first among the three candidates it recommended to Gov. Phil Scott. Vermont’s executive fills countywide positions that become vacant in nonelection years.
But Scott, a Republican, skipped over Kranichfeld. He chose one of the two other candidates, Sarah George, who was also a prosecutor in the Chittenden County office, to complete the term. The decision would alter the career trajectory of both attorneys.
Since then, George has emerged as one of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors, part of a wave of reformists vowing to jail fewer people and rebuild the criminal justice system from within.
She refuses to request that judges set cash bail, espousing the belief that lack of money should not keep somebody locked up. She also declines to prosecute charges that stem from traffic stops for minor matters, such as a broken taillight, since data show that people of color are disproportionately affected. And she has aggressively expanded the use of programs that divert people from courtrooms, including restorative justice, a victim-involved process that focuses more on mediation than punishment. Defendants who complete restorative programs can avoid getting a criminal record.
Kranichfeld, meanwhile, left the Chittenden prosecutor’s office after learning that George would be his new boss and went on to work for Donovan at the AG’s office. But the sting of not landing the job he’d long coveted ultimately led him to pursue a much different calling. In 2019, he enrolled in a Montréal seminary.
Three years later, he was ordained and would serve as the priest-in-charge at the St. Paul’s and All Saints Episcopal churches, which are located in Vergennes and South Burlington.
Then, in 2023, Scott had to appoint yet another state’s attorney, this time in Franklin County. John Lavoie resigned during an impeachment probe prompted by employees who complained that he frequently used sexist and crass language in the office. Scott chose Kranichfeld, who remains in charge to this day.
Now Kranichfeld, 46, is again seeking to become Chittenden County’s top prosecutor — only this time, it will be voters who decide whether he gets the job.
The Old North End resident is waging a Democratic primary challenge against George, his former colleague, arguing that her reformist policies have made the city less safe. With no Republicans in contention, the August 11 election will likely determine the winner.
George has become a target for frustrated Burlington business owners, local officials and residents who believe that her progressive approach to prosecuting has allowed petty crime and public drug use to take hold in the Queen City. This core group of what could be described as ABG voters — Anyone-but-George — has thrown its enthusiastic support behind Kranichfeld.
Any path to victory for him would also need to include those who share George’s concerns about racial inequities and mass incarceration but who have come to feel that, under her watch, the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of liberal reform.
The race is a test of both the public’s patience and its commitment to the progressive vision of a more equitable justice system that she has long championed.
George’s supporters say she is unfairly blamed for societal problems beyond her control.
“What I see is her actually trying to make things better, instead of just trying to make them go away,” said Jason Van Driesche, the chief of staff at Front Porch Forum, who hosted an event for George at his Burlington home last month.
But even onetime sympathizers fret that her attempts to push reforms in isolation, rather than at a statewide level, have carried unhappy consequences.
What I see is her actually trying to make things better, instead of just trying to make them go away.
Jason Van Driesche
Ben Traverse, a Democrat who is president of the Burlington City Council, said he previously voted for George, sharing her belief in criminal-justice reform. Now, though, “I’m ready for a change,” he said.
“There’s no single person to blame for the public safety challenges we face here,” Traverse said. “But if anyone should be held accountable, it is the county’s chief law enforcement officer, and that’s our state’s attorney.”
Kranichfeld has sought to frame himself as just as compassionate as George yet more pragmatic. He, too, expresses support for programs that funnel people away from the traditional court system and says he does not believe more people need to be imprisoned for the community to be safer.
And yet at its core his campaign is a call for more accountability, which he says has been sorely lacking under George.
If elected, Kranichfeld says, he would resume asking judges to impose cash bail. He has also vowed to reverse George’s policy against prosecuting most charges that arise from low-level traffic stops. He would address the concerns about those policies on a case-by-case basis, he said.
Sounding one of his campaign refrains, Kranichfeld said, “We have an opportunity to take ourselves in a better direction.”
George would say that direction is backward. She says Kranichfeld is trying to have it both ways, because asking for cash bail again would surely lead to putting more people behind bars before they’re convicted. Failing to acknowledge that simple fact, she added, is disingenuous.
Her office is already holding people accountable every day, she said: “We’re just doing it without sending them to prison because they can’t afford bail.”
Her pitch? Stay the course.
George said her office is in a much better place than it was four years ago, when the court system was shut down because of the pandemic and Burlington was experiencing a spate of shootings.
Today, violent crime is down. The backlog of cases has largely been cleared. And a new initiative aimed at reining in repeat offenders is showing promise, George said, both in getting people into court and addressing underlying issues that contributed to their legal woes.
That, in George’s mind, remains the only way to meaningfully improve public safety.
“It takes a bit more time and certainly more compassion,” she said. “But I think the results we see are far longer-lasting.”
Legal Foundations
George’s route to the prosecutor’s office was a relatively straight one.
Raised in Quechee, she earned a degree in criminal justice and psychology from the University of Connecticut, then a master’s in forensic psychology from Castleton State College, which is now part of the Vermont State University system. When she graduated from Vermont Law School in 2010, Donovan, who would distinguish himself as a supporter of criminal justice reform, took her on as a deputy prosecutor.
She focused mostly on domestic violence cases, which she described as difficult but rewarding work, during her first four years on the job.
She credits her mother, who spent more than four decades as a registered nurse at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, with instilling in her a deep sense of empathy.
Being a prosecutor is the only job she’s ever known — besides a weekend waitressing gig at the Simon Pearce Restaurant in Quechee; she kept it for years, even after taking over as state’s attorney, in order to pay down her student loans. She now lives in Colchester with her wife, Judy Sanchez.
“This is always where I’ve wanted to be,” George said of the Chittenden County job.
Kranichfeld, on the other hand, graduated from the University of Chicago and Cornell Law School, then began his career at a Wall Street law firm in 2004 — around the same time he began to contemplate spirituality more deeply. His mother, who had converted from Judaism to the Episcopal Church in the 1990s, had been diagnosed with leukemia while he was in law school. As her health worsened, Kranichfeld felt drawn to a house of worship he walked past on his way to work.
“One day, I looked up at it and saw it as a hospital, a sanctuary,” he told Seven Days for a 2019 story about his religious work. “So I walked in, and it pretty much changed my life.” At 25, Kranichfeld was baptized into the Episcopal Church.
Soon afterward, he realized that corporate law made him feel empty. So in 2006, he moved to Burlington for a judicial clerkship. Donovan hired him the following year.
Kranichfeld became involved in local politics soon after landing in the Queen City, where he and his wife, Erin, settled in the Old North End. He was elected to the Burlington City Council in 2010 and ran for the Democratic nomination for mayor the following year, coming in third behind Miro Weinberger and Tim Ashe.
In 2013, he became the executive director of the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, which coordinates the work of Vermont’s 28 county law-enforcement offices. He returned to the prosecutor’s office two years later, and set his sights on Donovan’s job in Burlington.
Looking back, losing the job to George may have been a blessing, Kranichfeld said. “If I had been appointed back then, I wouldn’t have been able to do all the things I’ve done since.”
That includes becoming a priest. Kranichfeld has continued to serve in the church since taking over in Franklin County, subbing in for Sunday services when other priests are out.
The priesthood, he said, taught him the true meaning of empathy. He recalled the summer he spent as a chaplain at the University of Vermont Medical Center, where he met patients who had arrived that morning with a stomachache, only to head home with a stage IV cancer diagnosis.
“Just being with people in these incredibly challenging moments in their lives was a tremendous lesson for me,” he said — one that has carried over to his work as a prosecutor.
His reentry into the legal profession hasn’t been entirely smooth.
Last summer, the state employees’ union filed a hostile work environment complaint on behalf of two attorneys and a victims’ advocate who accused Kranichfeld of mismanaging the Franklin County office he had been tasked with fixing. The complaint alleged that Kranichfeld showed favoritism to certain attorneys while failing to properly distribute caseloads. It also said he did not effectively mediate some conflicts between employees.
Kranichfeld told Seven Days that he brought in an outside mediator in an attempt to address conflicts between staffers but otherwise declined to comment on the accusations directly, citing confidentiality surrounding personnel issues. In a prepared statement, he said the grievance was resolved by the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs and that he stands by his work in Franklin County.
“I have strived for an office environment that is safe, supported, and equitable for staff, and have promoted an office culture of professionalism and teamwork,” he said.
Catch and Release
George was fielding questions at a recent neighborhood planning assembly meeting when a woman took the microphone and described hearing that the prosecutor often declines to charge crimes. The resident wondered if George had heard this, too, and what she had to say about it.
“I’m trying to untangle myth and reality about you,” she told the prosecutor.
George couldn’t help but laugh. She’s heard as much, too, she said, and went on to explain that the past several years have felt like one long attempt to correct the public narrative about her work.
While incumbency carries the benefit of name recognition, for George, it also has its downside: Many voters believe things about her that she maintains aren’t true.
Perhaps the biggest misconception, George said, is that she spends the bulk of her time finding ways not to prosecute offenders. While the state’s digital management system makes it impossible to track the number of times she has declined to pursue a case police have sent her, George said her office charges the vast majority of times.
When it declines to prosecute, it’s for a good reason, she said.
That may be because police have not secured enough evidence to support filing charges. She said she typically will send those cases back and ask police to do more work.
She has also determined at times that prosecuting certain cases would be a waste of her limited resources. She has twice declined to charge groups of protesters who were arrested for refusing to leave a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Williston, noting that most had no criminal record. She has also declined to charge six people arrested while protesting at the March 11 ICE raid in South Burlington and instead referred three of their cases to a restorative justice process. George said it seemed clear that police had escalated the situation in an unacceptable manner.
She encouraged attendees at the recent neighborhood planning assembly meeting to email her whenever they wonder why she’s handled a case in a certain way. All of her policies are on her website, she said, and every criminal case has a public file.
“You can come to court on any day and watch all the prosecution happening,” she said, “and I don’t say that to brag about it.”
And yet the fact remains that a significant portion of the crime afflicting Burlington has been perpetrated by a relatively small group of people who offend over and over, sometimes within hours of being picked up on their latest charge. Those repeat offenders have come to represent George’s biggest political liability, held up by her critics as proof that her ideological stances come at the expense of public safety.
George spends a considerable amount of time on the campaign trail addressing this. In her telling, the pandemic bears much of the blame.
COVID-19 “decimated our community,” she said, resulting in escalating homelessness and drug use that led to a spike in crimes most often associated with poverty. It also shut down Vermont courthouses to trials for more than two years, making it difficult to resolve cases. Defendants often enter plea agreements rather than go to trial, George said. With no prospect of facing a jury, they lacked motivation to do so.
Then came the wave of gun violence that swept across much of the U.S. in summer 2022. Burlington reported more than two dozen gunfire incidents that year, and by the time the courthouse reopened to trials in the fall, Chittenden County as a whole had nine pending homicide cases.
George said she made the decision to reserve open trial dates for serious crimes, which left many lower-level cases on the back burner. When those cases did come up for a hearing, defendants would often miss the dates, only to re-offend, adding yet more cases to the clogged system.
A drumbeat of criticism began to grow from people who believed George should be doing more to protect the community — mainly, by locking up notorious repeat offenders while their cases were pending, so that at least they were no longer harming local businesses. But George refused to heed the calls, maintaining that prison stints would not help address the behaviors long-term.
As she geared up for her 2022 reelection campaign, George faced a primary challenge from local attorney Ted Kenney. He was the third candidate Scott had recommended to succeed Donovan back in 2016.
Campaigning on a promise to clean up the streets, Kenney advocated for a more aggressive approach to repeat offenders. His appeals won him support from the business community, as well as local law enforcement — some of whom, according to George, turned out to be openly campaigning for him while on duty.
“Telling witnesses, ‘Don’t bother reporting this, because Sarah’s office won’t prosecute,’” George said. “Really, really dangerous stuff.”
Around America, progressive prosecutors met resistance amid a period of rising crime. As the election approached, many observers believed George was vulnerable.
But she beat Kenney by 20 points, earning more votes than he did in every Chittenden County town. The vote was particularly lopsided in Burlington, the target of Kenney’s public safety message, where George secured nearly twice as many votes as her opponent. She told Seven Days on election night that the result suggested that traditional tough-on-crime rhetoric doesn’t resonate in Vermont.
Four years later, George said she’s still trying to repair the damage to her reputation. It’s why she’s out talking to as many people as she can, she said at the recent neighborhood meeting. Whether it will convince her critics remains to be seen.
“Some people, you can give them the facts all day, and they just don’t listen, especially if it’s coming from me,” she said. “People will believe a lie far, far faster than they’ll believe the truth.”
You’ve Got Bail
The catch-and-release cycle that has played out under George has given Kranichfeld an opportunity to differentiate himself. He says he would end it by asking judges to set cash bail.
He readily acknowledges that the practice tends to punish poor people while allowing the well-to-do to go free while awaiting trial. But he said he only seeks it in cases where defendants have a history of skipping court and always considers someone’s ability to pay when determining how much to request.
The point is to ensure people show up to court so that their cases can be resolved more quickly, Kranichfeld said, and prosecutors in every other county in Vermont rely on it.
“If we don’t like cash bail, the responsible thing is for the people of Vermont, through their duly elected representatives in our legislature, to replace it with some other regime,” he said. “But it is irresponsible for a state’s attorney to unilaterally just throw it out.”
George counters that legislative fixes take years, while throwing people in jail because they can’t come up with $200 has an immediate, costly impact.
It costs the state roughly $100,000 to incarcerate somebody for a year, and research shows that people who spend time in prison are more likely to commit violent crimes when they get out.
But perhaps the more convincing argument against using cash bail to compel court appearances, she said, is that it doesn’t work. When Illinois eliminated cash bail several years ago, appearance rates did not meaningfully change. That’s because most people miss court dates not because they don’t feel compelled to appear but because they forget, George said.
“These are individuals who have no phones, often no housing, and are figuring out each day where they’re going to get their next meal,” she said. Expecting them to remember to show up for a court date that’s set three months out is setting them up to fail, she said.
So, when the governor’s office came to her last fall asking for ideas on how to address the backlog, George said she had an answer ready. “I told him I need a courtroom, a judge and a prosecutor,” she said.
I’m ready for change.
Ben Traverse
Asked about how the program started, the governor’s office said in a statement that it involved a collaborative process that stemmed from conversations with business owners and included input from a variety of different agencies.
Scott, who had once publicly sparred with George over her decision to dismiss three high-profile murder cases in which the defendant’s sanity was in question, secured funding to get it going. And in October, Chittenden County debuted a so-called accountability court, which focused entirely on defendants with five or more pending cases.
The special schedule had two main benefits. Defendants were in court far more frequently and got connected with people equipped to address their underlying issues. Howard Center case managers were embedded in the courtroom and steered defendants toward housing opportunities, drug treatment options and mental health services.
By the time the state-funded pilot program ended in February, Zach Weight, a Washington County prosecutor who Scott chose to head the effort, had cleared more than 700 cases.
George has since continued the expedited docket on her own. Every Friday, she presides over a day of hearings involving people with multiple open cases — generally minor offenses, such as shoplifting — who are expected to show up.
She says the arrangement is already showing promise in getting people to appear and engage in treatment. The docket now features only about two dozen defendants, she said.
On a recent day of hearings, only one defendant who was scheduled to appear failed to show up. George worried the man might have fallen back into drug use. His attorney tracked him down later that day: He had enrolled himself into a residential treatment program.
Closing Arguments
The dynamics at play in this contest aren’t that much different from when Kenney challenged George four years ago.
Kranichfeld has little interest in discussing the previous attempt to unseat George, saying in an interview that he didn’t know enough about Kenney’s campaign to comment intelligently. Still, he appears to be wary of defining himself as merely a tough-on-crime candidate.
For example: He has yet to seek the endorsement of local police unions. And rather than invoke fearful scenes of streets in chaos, he leans into optimistic imagery. Kranichfeld’s campaign signs depict a sun peeking over a mountain range, and his speeches are peppered with promises of “better outcomes” and a “brighter future.”
“We are running a positive, issues-based campaign,” he said.
When he kicked off his campaign in Dewey Park in Burlington’s Old North End, Kranichfeld recounted an incident that he said happened when his family headed to downtown Burlington for a local ghost tour in October. Young men approached the group and threatened them with a Taser, according to Kranichfeld. He said the incident left him and his two children, ages 9 and 12, shaken. But he said he did not call the police afterward because, “even if they had shown up,” he did not believe George’s office would prosecute the perpetrators.
George’s takeaway from the speech was that Kranichfeld was willing to spread false narratives to get elected. A case involving threats with a Taser would be taken seriously by her office, she said, and to suggest otherwise is “incredibly insulting.”
Kranichfeld responded that the anecdote was not intended to tar George but rather to “invoke the feeling of lawlessness and frustration that many in our community feel.” He accused the incumbent of dismissing his experience the same way she has dismissed the concerns of many others.
The candidates’ first debate last week featured less mudslinging but revealed stark differences between their prosecutorial philosophies.
The Lake Champlain Chamber hosted the virtual event, and more than three dozen people logged in online, including business owners who are supporting Kranichfeld.
Over the course of an hour, the two candidates fielded questions that mostly focused on accountability and how to handle repeat offenders.
If George felt any pressure to tone down her rhetoric for skeptics in the audience, she didn’t show it. She reiterated her concerns about cash bail and her belief that sending more people to prison for nonviolent offenses — especially before they’ve been convicted — is bad policy.
“People commit crimes because of their basic needs not being met,” she said. “The longer we delay that, the longer it will take for victims to have any sort of closure.”
Kranichfeld had a different message. The state’s attorney’s job is to be an advocate for the community, he said, and to seek outcomes that benefit the collective, rather than any individual. He said he approaches each case by asking how many “bites of the apple” the person has had. On the first offense, he might consider a more lenient approach. But the 10th? The 20th?
Connecting someone to treatment is always a goal, he said. But eventually, a prosecutor needs to consider whether certain offenders will ever accept the help they need.
His message was clear: In the courtroom, compassion has its limits. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Pleading Their Case | Bram Kranichfeld says he should be Chittenden County’s next state’s attorney. Reform-minded incumbent Sarah George objects.”
This article appears in July 1 • 2026.
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