The head of the state’s public defender’s office says he believes the 18-year-old former Fair Haven high student accused in a thwarted school shooting plot has been “overcharged” by prosecutors.
Jack Sawyer, 18, of Poultney, will be making his first court appearance this week since his arraignment earlier this month on four felony offenses. The charges include attempted aggravated murder, attempted first-degree murder and attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
If convicted, Sawyer faces the possibility of life in prison.
Sawyer entered not guilty pleas to those charges and was ordered held with bail. He is currently at the Rutland jail. Sawyer is expected to be in Rutland Superior criminal court Tuesday for a hearing to determine if he can continue to be held without bail pending trial.
Asked on Monday if the charges brought by prosecutors were too harsh, Vermont Defender General Matthew Valerio, whose office represents Sawyer, said, “Yes, I think the case is overcharged, but I guess we’ll wait and see what a court and a jury may say down the road.”
Valerio added, “Particularly with attempted crimes, you have to have overt acts in furtherance of whatever the attempt is supposed to be. I don’t think we’ve really seen that.”
Valerio said that he wasn’t going to argue the specific details of the case in the press.
“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said, then added, “I’ve read everything, but I don’t think what they have so far adds up” to what’s been charged.
Christopher Davis, a public defender, represented Sawyer at his arraignment earlier this month. However, Kelly Green, a public defender who handles serious felony cases, has since been assigned to the case.
Green declined Monday to comment on the details of the Sawyer case, or what arguments she intends to make during her client’s court appearance Tuesday.
“Come to the hearing,” she told a reporter.
Rutland County State’s Attorney Rose Kennedy, whose office is prosecuting Sawyer, said in an email Monday that she stands by the charges she filed in the case.
“I will litigate this matter in court and not in media,” she said.
Sawyer, according to police affidavits filed in support of the charges, threatened to cause “mass casualties” at Fair Haven Union High School.
Prosecutors said in court filings that Sawyer did indeed take actions to carry out the shooting, and also wrote down his preparations in a notebook titled “The Journal of an Active Shooter.”
Among the steps Sawyer took, according to the prosecutors, were purchasing a 12-gauge shotgun and buying ammunition in the days prior to his arrest.
Also, according to a police affidavit, Sawyer talked of shooting up his former high school in a text exchange with a friend.
That friend, who has since been identified in media reports as 17-year-old Angela McDevitt of Poughkeepsie, New York, then alerted law enforcement leading to Sawyer’s arrest.
At times during that text exchange with McDevitt, which is recounted in court records, Sawyer also seemed to abandon plans to “shoot up” the Fair Haven school.
But, in later interviews with police detectives, prosecutors wrote in a court filing that Sawyer “admitted that the plan was still his intent and and that he had recently improved his plan and moved up his date of execution to March 14, 2018.”
Sawyer also told the detectives that he planned to buy an AR-15 rifle and 9 mm handgun. However, police said, there was no indication that Sawyer had bought either weapon.
Sawyer told detectives that he took money from his bank account and put it in a Bitcoin account late last month so that he could buy a “Glock on the Dark Web,” the police affidavit stated.
However, according to police, after purchasing $500 in Bitcoin, the market for the online currency fell, and Sawyer told them he did not have enough funds to buy the handgun until it rebounded.
Police learned of Sawyer’s alleged threat in Fair Haven only hours after a school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. A day after Sawyer’s arrest, Gov. Phil Scott called a press conference and said he was “jolted” by the affidavit outlining the allegations in the Vermont case.
Scott also said that in the wake of the thwarted school shooting plot he was open to reviewing guns law in the state, an about-face from his previous position in which he maintained that no new gun legislation was needed in Vermont.
Lawmakers say that a sweeping shift in public sentiment has moved them to press ahead on a host of bills regarding gun legislation that earlier this session appeared to be stalled.
That legislation includes requiring universal background checks for the private sales of firearms in the state, which is expected to be taken up in the Senate later this week. Scott says he’s open to discussing the bill, but won’t commit to signing it.
As lawmakers debate these gun laws, Sawyer will be in court Tuesday for a “weight-of-the-evidence” hearing.
Such hearings determine if someone charged with certain serious crimes can continue to be held without bail pending trial.
Robert Sand, a professor at Vermont Law School and a former Windsor County state attorney with more than two decades experience as a prosecutor, declined to talk specifically about the Sawyer case. However, he said in general, judges attempt to determine whether the “evidence of guilt is great.”
In the hearing, the prosecution can present any “admissible” evidence that could support a conviction, Sand said. A judge could still find that a defendant is entitled to bail even after determining that the “evidence of guilt is great,” he said. At that point, the judge would decide what conditions, as well as how much bail, if any, should be imposed.
In a “weight-of-the-evidence” hearing, only the prosecution presents facts in the case, he said. In a trial, the defense would also have an opportunity to give evidence to the court.
