Updated at 5:50 p.m.
For months, the man accused of shooting three Palestinian American college students in Burlington has rejected his attorneys’ advice to mount an insanity defense. Instead, Jason Eaton has admitted to the crime and claimed he should receive immunity because, he has said, he was acting at the behest of the CIA.
But after a judge ruled earlier this week that he is competent to stand trial, Eaton has changed his tune.
On Friday, Eaton granted his legal team permission to raise the question of his sanity at trial, adding an 11th-hour wrinkle to the closely-watched case. The move, while not entirely unexpected, means that Eaton’s trial could be postponed. It’s currently scheduled for the first week of June.
Peggy Jansch, one of Eaton’s attorneys, has requested a hearing on Monday afternoon, where she said she hopes to convince a judge to schedule the trial for later this year.
“Having less than two months to flesh out the insanity defense is impractical,” Jansch said in a phone call. “The state would have to depose my yet-to-be-disclosed expert and then hire their own expert. To be done properly, it shouldn’t be rushed.”
Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George said she strongly opposes moving the trial.
“This notice coming 2.5 years after the incident is incredibly frustrating and disrespectful to the work that has been done to get this case ready for trial and give the community and victims the closure they deserve,” she wrote in a text message.
Eaton’s pursuit of an insanity defense will return the focus to the question of why he apparently decided to shoot three strangers who happened to be walking by his Burlington apartment in November 2023.
The victims and their supporters have maintained that the facts of the shooting alone are enough to show that Eaton specifically targeted the young men because of their identities. The shooting occurred shortly after the start of the war in Gaza, and the men were speaking a mix of English and Arabic, with two wearing Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs.
But prosecutors have previously said they found no evidence to support the idea that Eaton harbored strong anti-Palestinian or pro-Israeli views. As Seven Days previously reported, Eaton had sent messages on a private account on X that seemed to express some sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
Insanity defenses almost never succeed at trial in Vermont. And prosecutors won’t need to prove Eaton’s motive for the shooting. But the question of why he did it could linger on the minds of jurors as they weigh whether he was legally insane at the time of a crime committed more than two years ago.
Eaton, for his part, has given varying accounts of his thinking that day, some of which were outlined in this week’s ruling from Judge John Pacht .
Speaking to a mental health provider in prison a few months after the attack, Eaton appeared to be at a loss for why he carried out the attack, saying it was “out of character” for him, Pacht wrote.
It was only later, while undergoing court-ordered evaluations meant to determine if he was fit to stand trial, that Eaton began to unspool the theory that he had been receiving messages from intelligence agencies through his FM radio, Pacht wrote.
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