I’ve heard some pretty strange reasons given for people committing crimes. Some people say that a voice told them to do it. Others say that the mafia was blackmailing them into doing it, and they had to do it to protect their family. John Hinckley, Jr. said that he shot President Reagan because he wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Okay, that last one may be the most bizarre of those three excuses (and Hinckley’s insanity defense in that shooting was successful, putting Hinckley in an institution for decades).
So, the excuse that we’re going to talk about today may not be the most bizarre excuse that you’ve ever heard. But it’s still pretty strange to actually hear of it being used in court. Michael R. Sisak with the Associated Press writes,
Jason Eaton insisted he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad when he shot three Palestinian college students who were walking past his home a few days after Thanksgiving. He said the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies transmitted the messages to him via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors.
Eaton’s claims were at the heart of his insanity defense as he went on trial Monday on attempted murder charges in a case that shook Burlington, Vermont, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college.
Now, while it’s true that the federal government, sometimes through the CIA, sometimes through other governmental organizations, has done some terrible things, they don’t tend to want that brought up in court when a person is trying to use those orders to beat a murder charge, so, I’m going to have to say that I’m thinking that he probably didn’t actually hear from the CIA or Mossad about this.
Especially via the radio.
Apparently, the jury didn’t buy that reason either.
Still, this was a weird story to come across.