Jason Eaton, the man accused of shooting and wounding three Palestinian and Palestinian-American men in Burlington nearly a year ago, has been deemed competent to stand trial, according to the judge presiding over the case.
The findings of Eaton’s psychological evaluation were discussed during a status hearing held Tuesday in Chittenden County Superior criminal court. During the hearing, Judge John Pacht also granted an extension of deadlines in the case.
In August, the court set a deadline of Dec. 16 to conduct depositions. But Eaton’s attorney, Peggy Jansch of the Chittenden County Public Defender’s Office, said during Tuesday’s hearing that there was “no way” she could complete depositions in that time frame.
Jansch asked the judge to extend that deadline to next June. “It’s a recognition of what we can do,” Jansch said.
The prosecutor, however, disagreed. Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George asked for a “significantly shorter” extension, requesting that Pacht set a late March deadline instead.
“I think that the end of June is a significant delay with no real reason for it to have taken this long,” George said. “If we do it until June we aren’t looking at a trial until the end of next year.”
The state, George said, has 30 witnesses queued up for trial testimony, and her office has conducted two depositions.
Pacht set a May 31 deadline to conduct depositions and continue interviewing witnesses. A status conference was scheduled for early March to determine how the matter was progressing.
“This really should be plenty of time to get things done,” Pacht said.
Eaton, 49, has been accused of shooting and wounding three Palestinian and Palestinian-American men — Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, all 20 years old at the time of the shooting.
The three attended high school together in the West Bank and were attending different colleges in the United States when the shooting took place. They had been visiting one of their families in Burlington for Thanksgiving.
They were walking on North Prospect Street on the evening of Nov. 25, speaking a mix of Arabic and English and wearing keffiyehs, a traditional scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian identity, authorities have said, when Eaton approached them from a nearby porch and allegedly shot all three.
At his arraignment, Eaton pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder. He has been held without bail at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans since his arrest soon after the shooting.
Despite calls for the act to be prosecuted as a hate crime, George, the state prosecutor, has previously said her team did not have enough evidence to add that charge.
Eaton was last in court in August, when he requested a private hearing to fire the public defenders representing him. He had also asked that he be able to make his case for firing his lawyers in a private court hearing — closed to the prosecution, public and the press — to explain his reasoning.
Both requests were denied at the Aug. 2 hearing by Superior Court Judge Kevin Griffin.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Jason Eaton, accused of shooting 3 Palestinian students in Burlington last year, deemed competent to stand trial.