Jason Eaton, the man accused of shooting three Palestinian students in Burlington in 2023, claimed without evidence during a court hearing on Friday that he had been acting under the instruction of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.
He said during the hearing that the three victims were associated with Hamas, and suggested he would pursue a public authority defense in his case because of his claimed ties to the CIA.
Eaton’s comments came during a court hearing to review motions he filed to gain access to the victims’ cellphone data, which Burlington police collected from them with their consent in the hours after their shooting. His motion also sought access to a Homeland Security document compiled after the incident.
Reviewing the victims’ cellphone data, he said, could help bolster his defense. He later asked Superior Court Judge John Pacht for permission to hire the head of defense at Palantir Technologies to review the data and brief the court on their findings.
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George suggested during the court hearing that Eaton’s comments in court provide some evidence for a hate crime enhancement.
“I do not believe this has any credibility at all,” George said of Eaton’s comments. “In fact, I think it is providing greater context than we’ve had for a possible hate crime enhancement.”
Eaton was deemed competent to stand trial in the fall. But on Friday, his defense attorney, Peggy Jansch, of the Chittenden County Public Defender’s Office, asked the court to order an updated competency hearing, citing his comments in court.
Eaton’s comments offer some insight into his defense strategy, and shed some light into his state of mind when he allegedly shot Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad on Nov. 25, 2023.
The three students, all 20 years old at the time, were in town visiting one of their families for Thanksgiving. They were walking on North Prospect Street, speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing kaffiyehs, a traditional scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian identity, when Eaton approached them from a nearby porch and allegedly shot all three.
He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder charges, and has been held without bail at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans since his arrest soon after the shooting.
His comments Friday prompted backlash from the victims’ attorney, William Clark, who said his clients were moving forward with a protective order to prevent access to their data.
“I’m not letting my victims be harassed under a completely frivolous theory of defense that does not even have an ethical ground to be able to be raised in court, regardless of its legal infirmity,” Clark said. “It’s pure harassment if they go forward with a deposition that’s asking about some of the allegations you’ve heard today.”
George has said previously that a hate crime enhancement against Eaton was unlikely, and that she did not have enough evidence to support such a charge.
She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether she would pursue a hate crime enhancement.
Eaton’s court case has lagged over the last year. He has repeatedly clashed with his attorneys over their defense strategy and has asked the court twice to fire them.
He claimed in a handwritten motion filed in April that his counsel insisted on an insanity defense “to which I do not consent.”
He claimed that they “refuse to investigate and prepare a defense based on the facts which I have disclosed for them” and claimed they would “prepare no other defense on ethical grounds.”
“They have failed at their paramount obligation to be loyal to their client — going so far as to undermine my credibility on the record by stating that they are exploring an insanity defense,” he wrote.
Jansch has supported Eaton’s motions for access to the victims’ cell phone data and other records throughout the case’s development.
“I have an obligation to see if there’s any factual support for Mr. Eaton’s defense,” she said on Friday.
But she appeared hesitant to push for his public authority defense. “If you want to raise it with the court, that’s up to you,” she said to Eaton in an aside on Friday. “I’m not going to.”
Pacht entertained Eaton’s theories during the hearing Friday, but questioned whether it was “an expression of a disorder that hasn’t been reviewed yet which Mr. Eaton suffers from.”
Regardless, Pacht noted the proposed line of defense had little to no factual basis to bring forward.
“I know of no law that would suggest that if a state police officer said, ‘This guy is a bad guy, he’s done lots of things, he’s really hurting the community, and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s doing anything about it, I’m authorizing you to do it yourself’ — that would clearly be a violation of law, as far as I can see,” Pacht said.
Pacht denied Eaton’s bid for new defense attorneys. He did not rule on his motions for cellphone data or federal government records — saying he would issue a written decision — but noted later that he was “not hearing why the cellphone data” would be material to the case.
The court extended the timeline for discovery in the case. Pacht said Friday that the case would not be ready for trial until at least the fall.
