Vermont Court Suspends Addison County Prosecutor's Law License

The Vermont Supreme Court stripped Addison County State’s Attorney Eva Vekos of her law license Friday in a 4-1 decision, suspending her ability to practice law while formal disciplinary proceedings haven’t even begun yet.

She can’t appear in court. She can’t file briefs or take part in hearings. But Vekos still holds her elected office, and that’s where Vermont law creates a genuinely strange situation: the state doesn’t require a sitting state’s attorney to hold an active license to practice law. The constitutional framework and the professional licensing system are running on separate tracks entirely.

Tim Lueders-Dumont, executive director of Vermont’s Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, confirmed Friday that Vekos remains in her post despite the court’s ruling. “She still is state’s attorney,” he said. “She is constitutionally and democratically the state’s attorney, but she cannot perform legal functions of an attorney.” When asked how Addison County would handle the prosecution workload without her in the courtroom, Lueders-Dumont didn’t hedge. “It’s going to be a group effort.”

The majority opinion concluded that Vekos’s DUI conviction met the definition of a “serious crime” under Vermont’s Professional Responsibility Program Rules, the framework that governs how Vermont disciplines attorneys through its Professional Responsibility Board. That classification triggered the interim suspension under the state’s attorney discipline process.

The court wasn’t unanimous.

Justice Christina Nolan dissented, and her opinion is pointed. “In my view,” Nolan wrote, “Disciplinary Counsel has failed to make the requisite demonstration that respondent Eva P. Vekos’s first-time misdemeanor driving under the influence (DUI) conviction is a ‘serious crime’ as that term is uniquely defined by our Professional Responsibility Program Rules.” Nolan’s position is that the majority crossed the threshold before Disciplinary Counsel had actually cleared it, and that matters for how this case proceeds.

A first-time misdemeanor DUI occupies genuinely contested ground in Vermont’s attorney discipline framework. Nolan’s dissent hands Vekos’s legal team a real argument on appeal. It’s not a symbolic objection.

David Sleigh, the attorney representing Vekos, told reporters Friday he hadn’t read the full ruling yet when reached. “The only thing I can do is say that I’m disappointed, and from our point of view, it’s the cart before the horse,” he said. Sleigh pointed to something concrete: a formal disciplinary petition against Vekos hasn’t been filed yet, which makes the court’s immediate suspension an unusually aggressive move. The suspension came down before the formal process under the attorney discipline process had formally launched.

VTDigger first reported the ruling on April 10, 2026.

The core tension here isn’t going away. Addison County voters elected Vekos to run the state’s attorney’s office. She still occupies that office in 2026, still draws the salary, still has authority over the office’s administrative functions. What she can’t do is prosecute cases. For a county state’s attorney, that’s most of the job. Lueders-Dumont’s office will have to absorb the legal work her suspension creates, and it’s not clear yet how long that arrangement will last. The 4-member majority on Vermont’s Supreme Court moved fast. Whether the formal disciplinary petition, when it’s eventually filed, produces the same outcome is a separate question entirely.