BURLINGTON – A Hartford man has been sentenced in federal court to two years in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered gun silencer.
The federal sentence runs concurrent to any sentence imposed in a pending state case of sexual assault of a minor, for which he intends to use a defense of insanity.
Joseph Vaillancourt, 43, was arrested in October 2024 and charged with two felony counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child and one misdemeanor count of criminal threatening.
Executing a search warrant after his arrest, law enforcement found evidence of an apparent marijuana distribution operation and obtained a second warrant to allow law enforcement to search for drug distribution and gun evidence, along with evidence of the original crime, federal court records show.
Investigatory efforts by the Hartford Police Department, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations yielded the seizure of a total of 13 firearms, over 1,200 rounds of ammunition and 30 firearm magazines.
One AR-style rifle that lacked a serial number had a silencer stored with the cache.
The National Firearms Act requires registration of all silencers, including homemade silencers like the one Vaillancourt possessed.
A year after his arrest, Vaillancourt was judged incompetent to stand trial in both the Windsor County and District Court dockets, the Valley News previously reported.
At the time, U.S. District Court in Burlington determined that Vaillancourt had been “suffering from a mental disease or defect,” therefore “unable to understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him or to assist properly in his defense,” according to court records.
In June of this year, he entered a guilty plea to possession of the unregistered silencer “after taking part in competency restoration through the U.S. Bureau of Prisons,” federal court records show.
Subsequently, in July, Vaillancourt’s defense counsel in the pending Windsor County case of sexual assault of a 16-year-old minor notified the court that he will rely upon a defense of insanity at the time of the alleged offenses.
He is scheduled for a status conference in Windsor Superior Court in October.
For pleading guilty to the one federal count of possession of an unregistered silencer, Chief U. S. District Judge Christina Reiss sentenced Vaillancourt to a term of 24 months of imprisonment to be followed by a three-year term of supervised release, running concurrent with credit for time served to any sentence imposed in the pending Windsor County Case.
