For my first take on this story, see Jack Straw From Wichita.
Background
Last Spring, just days after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida (which, I’m unhappy to report, some people have already forgotten; while visiting Chicago last week, I had to remind someone which school shooting Parkland was, and even after I reminded them, I’m not 100% sure they remembered — though I guess that’s easy to forgive when, as Chicagoans, they saw 66 people shot just in the one full weekend I was there) — anyway, just days after Parkland, the Vermont State Police arrested a young man from my hometown for planning to shoot up a neighboring school (“planning to,” mind you; he didn’t actually load up a gun and walk into the school — though he did write about and talk about his plans and he had purchased and was training himself to use a gun).
Prosecutors charged him with “attempted murder” despite his never actually attempting the crime. His lawyers appealed, and through a ruling ostensibly related to a bail hearing, the Vermont Supreme Court essentially forced the state to drop the charges of attempted murder, citing a lack of evidence when it came to the legal requirements of the word “attempt.”
For the record, I completely agreed with the Vermont Supreme Court, but I am also sympathetic to the desire of the prosecutors to protect local community members from Jack Sawyer’s seriously threatened act of massive and deadly violence.
With the heaviest charges dismissed, the state is now pursuing two lesser chargers: “criminal threatening” and “carrying a deadly weapon with an avowed purpose of injuring a fellow man.”
Based on the already demonstrated evidence, I suspect Mr. Sawyer will be — and ought to be — found guilty (well, the second charge could be sticky, since it assumes the deadly weapon is being carried at the same time the accused is going to act on his purpose, and the Supreme Court has already supported the idea that Mr. Sawyer did not yet act on his purpose…but there may be case law that defines 13 V.S.A. § 4003 more deeply than the legislative record, so I make no judgements here).
Current Status
The latest twist in the case, however, is that the lawyer for Mr. Sawyer has asked the court to award his 18-year-old client “youthful offender status.”
Coincidentally enough, on July 1st of this year, Vermont redefined “youthful offender status,” raising the age of qualified persons from 17 to 23 based on the undisputed findings of brain science, which tell us that humans don’t have fully developed brains until their early to mid-twenties.
When a defense attorney requests youthful offender status, “the case is…immediately sealed and the process starts with risk assessments from the Department for Children & Families. If an offender is deemed a low or moderate risk to re-offend, the prosecutor is instructed to send the case to diversion,” rather than to the criminal justice system.
“Diversion” is, essentially, a system of nonprofits funded by the state’s Attorney General’s office to handle specific cases using the Restorative Justice Model, rather than the traditional retribution and correction model.
If Jack Sawyer is granted youthful offender status, the public will have no right to follow his case as it moves through the system, but (ideally) he will be steered towards restoring whatever harms his actions may have caused, whether through community service, direct payments, or victim-offender interactions.
Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Examining The Question
Let’s start with the reality that people in this community are genuinely frightened of sending their children to school knowing that an 18-year-old person told police that they can’t stop him from acting on his violent urges. According to his own threats made directly in the face of police officers, as soon as he has the chance, he is going to come for the children in that school.
When a person makes that kind of threat in a neighborhood filled with easily accessible guns, the community’s desire to constantly know the whereabouts of that individual is valid (especially as the new school year is about to begin).
But the state of Vermont, through a legislative process, admits that people under the age of 23 make irrational decisions based on the particular cooking time of their brains. To try them as adults without interrogating the particular details of each unique brain is to judge them too harshly. It is to ignore the reality that their brains are still under development, and hence, more open to communal influence of both a negative and positive sort.
If a person were to go through the diversion process under the paranoid eye of rightfully frightened parents, peers, and neighbors, the communal influence is not likely to be so positive. Thankfully, the state of Vermont, like all states (I hope), keeps its youth diversion process confidential. Youthful offenders who move successfully through the process can have their cases sealed and their records expunged, preventing the actions of their partially developed brains from hindering the future of their fully developed ones.
Those are the realities in our community today. As a state, we are frightened of the unknowns when it comes to Jack Sawyer’s threats; and as a state, we admit that he might just be a kid who has ventured way beyond his depth, and now it’s time for us, as a community, to jump in and save him.
There is a process to this. Some people — some of our neighbors — are going to look hard at this case, and they’re going to decide whether Mr. Sawyer’s brain is fully cooked, and if it’s not, whether he’s likely to be successfully diverted from acting on his threats.
I don’t envy the job of these people. If they decide he’s a youthful offender, you’ll hopefully never hear his name again, and Jack Sawyer will go on to live a quiet, peaceful life where he brings tri-colored pasta salads to neighborhood cook outs and volunteers to coach first base at his daughter’s softball games. But if they’re wrong, Jack Sawyer may one day live a loud, demonstrative life where some people across America will know his name…for at least a couple of hours.
I don’t envy the job of these people at all.