Lawmakers pursue two courses of action in wake of Sawyer decision

By Alan J. Keays, VTDigger.org

House and Senate judiciary committees are taking two paths as they look to respond to a court ruling that may lead to the the most serious charges being thrown out against an 18-year-old Poultney man accused of threatening “mass casualties” at his former high school.

The Senate panel on Thursday approved making changes to the state’s anti-terrorism statutes to address threats of mass killings in light of a decision last week from the Vermont Supreme Court in the case of Jack Sawyer of Poultney.

Their colleagues in the House took up that domestic terrorism bill in the afternoon and raised numerous concerns about it before deciding to take further testimony on Friday or next week.

In the morning, the House committee worked on revising the statutes on attempt offenses. The high court found that the allegations against Sawyer represented merely planning or preparation, not an “attempt” to carry out a crime under Vermont case law, but also invited lawmakers to change those laws.

“I expect that we will have a bill or two bills to the governor, my hope would be, by the end of the next week, which is what I think I told him last Friday,” Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, Senate Judiciary Committee chair, said Thursday.

Gov. Phil Scott late last week asked the Legislature to act “quickly” so legislation could be in effect by the time students at Fair Haven Union High School return from April vacation, which is Monday.

Fair Haven students, faculty and staff attended sessions this week of both House and Senate panels, urging changes to update state law in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Sawyer’s case.

Sawyer was arrested in mid-February on four felony attempt charges, including attempted aggravated murder and attempted first-degree murder, after police say they uncovered his plot to shoot up Fair Haven Union High School.

He has pleaded innocent to those charges and was ordered held without bail. However, his attorneys appealed that bail decision.

A three-justice panel of the high court reversed that bail order last week, saying that Sawyer could no longer be held without bail because the charges did not meet the standard needed for attempt crimes in Vermont.

That decision, issued by Justices Harold Eaton, Karen Carroll and Beth Robinson, ended by stating, “The Legislature can, if it chooses, deviate from this long-established standard by passing a law revising the definition of attempt.”

Both the House and Senate judiciary committees have been talking throughout the week about how they should do that.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had looked at making revisions to the state’s attempt statute, but decided it was too complex of a task to complete in short order. Instead, the panel moved on to the state’s domestic terrorism law to try to address the situation.

“I’m not giving up on attempt,” Sears said after his committee adjourned Thursday. “I just felt that we were making real progress on the domestic terrorism side and I shifted gears.”

According the proposed legislation, which was unanimously approved by the Senate panel, “domestic terrorism” means “threatening to engage in, engaging in, or taking substantial steps” to cause death or serious injury to multiple people or threaten any “civilian population with mass destruction, mass killings, or kidnapping.”

Also, according the proposal, “Substantial steps” means “conduct that strongly corroborative of the actor’s intent to complete the commission of the offense.”

A person who “knowingly and willfully engages” in domestic terrorism, the legislation stated, faces up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

Changes in the law would apply to future prosecutions, but they cannot be applied retroactively to Sawyer.

Rep. Chip Conquest, D-Wells River and vice chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said it was unclear how exactly the domestic terrorism law, in its current form, would address the legal issue at hand. He also expressed concern about “conflating the threatening with this really serious charge,” which carries a prison sentence of 20 years.

“It’s clear the committee’s not comfortable about it,” he said of the current version.

Conquest said he would prefer to focus on fixing the state’s attempt statute, rather than approaching the issue through new terrorism laws. “I think we ought to focus on fixing the problem that the Supreme Court decision pointed out,” he said.

Maxine Grad, D-Moretown and the committee chair, said she would invite Public Safety Commissioner Tom Anderson, who proposed the initial domestic terrorism language, to explain its intent on Friday.

Rutland County State’s Attorney Rose Kennedy, who is prosecuting Sawyer, told the Senate panel this week that she there to “beg for an attempt statute that will work.”

If law enforcement were forced to wait to arrest Sawyer until he went on the school grounds with an arsenal weapons, it would be too late and the consequences would be deadly, Kennedy said.

Defender General Matthew Valerio, whose office is defending Sawyer, also testified before the committee, saying from the beginning of the case that he believed the prosecutor “overcharged” the case, and brought charges that did not fit the actions alleged.

He has suggested other avenues that could have been pursued in the case, including seeking of an involuntary hospitalization order to allow for psychiatric treatment.

Scott had said that he wanted the new attempt legislation and domestic terrorism bill on his desk by the end of this week so they could go into force before students return from school vacation on Monday.

That looks unlikely with testimony set to continue on both bills on Friday.

“We committed to working on this expeditiously,” Senate Pro Tem Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden and a judiciary committee member, said on Thursday. “Frankly, the public isn’t worrying about Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, whatever. They just want us to not make a mistake.”

At a hearing earlier this week in Rutland Superior criminal court, Judge Thomas Zonay set $100,000 bail for Sawyer, and ordered released, it be to the custody of his father, David Sawyer of Poultney.

David Sawyer testified at the bail hearing that if he could post bail he planned to take his son to the Brattleboro Retreat for inpatient psychiatric care.

As of late Thursday afternoon, Sawyer remained incarcerated at the Rutland jail, according to the state’s online inmate locator.