livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
He Wrote Disturbing Plans for a School Shooting. But Was That a Crime?
FAIR HAVEN, Vt. — When people who knew Jack Sawyer saw something, they said something.
A mother told the police that Mr. Sawyer, who had seemed troubled in the past, had just bought a gun. A friend of the young man also contacted the police: He was talking admiringly of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., the friend warned, and hinting at sinister plans of his own.
The police soon detained Mr. Sawyer, 18, a former student at Fair Haven Union High School. They said they had found a journal in his car that laid out disturbing plans for a shooting at the high school. “I’m aiming to kill as many as I can,” the journal read. The school resource officer, the journal went on, might have to be shot “point blank” in the head.
Mr. Sawyer was charged with aggravated assault, two counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder — all felonies — and held without bail. Many in Fair Haven, a town of 2,700 residents on the western edge of Vermont, exhaled, believing they had stopped America’s next mass shooting.
But last month, a ruling by the Vermont Supreme Court cast doubt on the viability of the charges against Mr. Sawyer. The most serious charges were soon dropped, leaving only misdemeanors, and he was released on bail last week.
Residents were outraged — fearful for their safety and angry at a legal system that seemed not to take into account the realities of school shootings. In recent weeks, school officials said, the district spent $150,000 on new school security measures. Parents were consumed with questions about security for graduation or prom. State troopers’ cars became a sight as common as the school bus outside of Fair Haven Union High.
“I think we are the ones in prison now,” said Jessica Nadeau, 37, whose daughter, Olasia, 14, spoke of a nightmare about Mr. Sawyer and the stories of what he might do. “Now we’re all the ones who are locked into this fear.”
As the nation grapples with massacres in places like Parkland and Las Vegas, much attention has been given to the importance of identifying would-be gunmen and stopping them long before carnage begins. But this case, which has unfolded in Vermont over the last three months, shows that even in situations where warnings emerge, there is no simple way to weigh the seriousness of a threat against the legal rights of an individual in a case where no shooting has happened.
The Vermont Supreme Court said Mr. Sawyer’s acts did not meet the legal standards of the most serious charges against him. To constitute an attempted crime, the justices said, someone would have to not only prepare to commit a crime but take clear steps toward carrying it out.
“An ‘attempt’ under Vermont law requires an intent to commit a crime, coupled with an act that, but for an interruption, would result in the completion of a crime,” three justices wrote. They looked to a 1906 case, in which the Supreme Court found that a prisoner who had obtained 12 hacksaws — but not yet used them to try to saw through the bars of his jail window — could not be convicted of attempting to escape. Mr. Sawyer, they said, “took no action so proximate to the commission of a school shooting as to constitute an attempt.”
More at ...
He Wrote Disturbing Plans for a School Shooting. But Was That a Crime?
FAIR HAVEN, Vt. — When people who knew Jack Sawyer saw something, they said something.
A mother told the police that Mr. Sawyer, who had seemed troubled in the past, had just bought a gun. A friend of the young man also contacted the police: He was talking admiringly of the school massacre in Parkland, Fla., the friend warned, and hinting at sinister plans of his own.
The police soon detained Mr. Sawyer, 18, a former student at Fair Haven Union High School. They said they had found a journal in his car that laid out disturbing plans for a shooting at the high school. “I’m aiming to kill as many as I can,” the journal read. The school resource officer, the journal went on, might have to be shot “point blank” in the head.
Mr. Sawyer was charged with aggravated assault, two counts of attempted aggravated murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder — all felonies — and held without bail. Many in Fair Haven, a town of 2,700 residents on the western edge of Vermont, exhaled, believing they had stopped America’s next mass shooting.
But last month, a ruling by the Vermont Supreme Court cast doubt on the viability of the charges against Mr. Sawyer. The most serious charges were soon dropped, leaving only misdemeanors, and he was released on bail last week.
Residents were outraged — fearful for their safety and angry at a legal system that seemed not to take into account the realities of school shootings. In recent weeks, school officials said, the district spent $150,000 on new school security measures. Parents were consumed with questions about security for graduation or prom. State troopers’ cars became a sight as common as the school bus outside of Fair Haven Union High.
“I think we are the ones in prison now,” said Jessica Nadeau, 37, whose daughter, Olasia, 14, spoke of a nightmare about Mr. Sawyer and the stories of what he might do. “Now we’re all the ones who are locked into this fear.”
As the nation grapples with massacres in places like Parkland and Las Vegas, much attention has been given to the importance of identifying would-be gunmen and stopping them long before carnage begins. But this case, which has unfolded in Vermont over the last three months, shows that even in situations where warnings emerge, there is no simple way to weigh the seriousness of a threat against the legal rights of an individual in a case where no shooting has happened.
The Vermont Supreme Court said Mr. Sawyer’s acts did not meet the legal standards of the most serious charges against him. To constitute an attempted crime, the justices said, someone would have to not only prepare to commit a crime but take clear steps toward carrying it out.
“An ‘attempt’ under Vermont law requires an intent to commit a crime, coupled with an act that, but for an interruption, would result in the completion of a crime,” three justices wrote. They looked to a 1906 case, in which the Supreme Court found that a prisoner who had obtained 12 hacksaws — but not yet used them to try to saw through the bars of his jail window — could not be convicted of attempting to escape. Mr. Sawyer, they said, “took no action so proximate to the commission of a school shooting as to constitute an attempt.”
More at ...
He Wrote Disturbing Plans for a School Shooting. But Was That a Crime?
The kid is undoubtedly a disturbed person.
