Prosecutors are calling on a federal judge to reject a request from attorneys of Teresa Youngblut to delay their decision-making process as they consider whether to bring charges that carry the death penalty in the fatal shooting of a U.S. border patrol agent in Vermont.
Youngblut’s attorney submitted a filing last month in federal court in Burlington seeking additional time from a deadline of this later this month to offer mitigating evidence on their client’s behalf.
Prosecutors responded in a 17-page filing this week that Judge Christina Reiss should not grant Youngblut’s defense team an extension from the July 28 deadline the prosecution had set.
Granting the defense’s request, the prosecutors wrote, would “violate the separation of power” principles and “infringe on the Executive Branch’s exclusive prosecutorial discretion in deciding whether (to) charge a death eligible offense or to seek the death penalty in this case.”
The government process to determine whether to seek the death penalty “is an internal process in which the defendant has no cognizable right to participate beyond the Executive Branch’s invitation,” the prosecutors added.
Reiss has yet to rule on the matter as of Wednesday afternoon.
Youngblut, 21, of Washington, who was also hurt in the Jan. 20 shootout in northern Vermont, has been held in custody since receiving treatment for injuries at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Youngblut has already been charged with federal firearms and assault offenses stemming from the shootout on Interstate 91 in Coventry that killed U.S Border Patrol Agent David Maland. According to court filings, Maland conducted a traffic stop that afternoon on a vehicle Youngblut had been driving.
During that traffic stop, according to charging documents, Youngblut came out of the vehicle and opened fire, leading to an exchange of gunfire with law enforcement at the scene.
Maland was killed in the shootout, as was Felix Bauckholt, a German national who was a passenger in the vehicle Youngblut was driving.
Youngblut has not been specifically charged with firing the shot that killed Maland. Federal authorities leading the investigation into the fatal shooting have refused to confirm who fired the fatal shot that killed Maland.
Prosecutors in their latest filing this week provided a similar summary of the shootout as they have in past court submissions, and again did not directly state that Youngblut fired the fatal shot. Instead, prosecutors wrote, as they have in the past, that he was killed in an “exchange of gunfire.”
Youngblut and Bauckholt allegedly had ties to a group of people known as the “Zizians.” Members of the group have been connected to several other homicides across the country, including in California and Pennsylvania.
Youngblut’s defense team has argued that a meeting called for by the prosecution for them to meet with the U.S Attorney General’s Capital Case Review Committee was too soon. They asked that the meeting be pushed back until at least January 2026.
That committee screens cases and makes recommendations to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office on whether to seek charges that carry the death penalty.
Prosecutors cited in their response the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that left three people dead and hundreds injured.
In that case, prosecutors wrote, attorneys for Tsarnaev asked for additional time to submit mitigating evidence ahead of a death penalty decision.
“In denying the defendant’s request” in that case, the prosecutors wrote, “the court recognized that the death penalty protocol’s inclusion of an opportunity for the defendant to submit information and materials for consideration in the Department’s internal deliberations was ‘prudent policy, but is not required by any constitutional, statutory, or decisional rule of law.’”
Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Vermont who are handling the case, through a spokesperson, declined comment on the latest filing Wednesday.
Steven Barth, an attorney for Youngblut, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
