State v. McLaughlin, A05-2327.

• Decision Date: 11 January 2007
• Docket Number: No. A05-2327.,A05-2327.
• Citation: 725 N.W.2d 703
• Parties: STATE of Minnesota, Respondent, v. John Jason McLAUGHLIN, Appellant.
• Court: Minnesota Supreme Court

725 N.W.2d 703

STATE of Minnesota, Respondent, v. John Jason McLAUGHLIN, Appellant.

No. A05-2327.

Supreme Court of Minnesota.

January 11, 2007.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

John M. Stuart, State Public Defender, Davi E. Axelson, Assistant State Public Defender, Minneapolis, MN, for Appellant.

Lori Swanson, Minnesota Attorney General, John B. Galus, Assistant Attorney General, St. Paul, MN, Janelle Kendall, Stearns County Attorney, St. Cloud, MN, for Respondent.

Heard, considered, and decided by the court en banc.

OPINION

ANDERSON, PAUL H., Justice.

Fifteen-year-old John Jason McLaughlin was tried as an adult and convicted for the murders of two fellow students whom McLaughlin shot at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota. After a bifurcated trial at which six expert witnesses testified regarding McLaughlin's mental health, the Stearns County District Court declined to excuse McLaughlin from criminal liability. The court found that McLaughlin knew it was morally wrong to shoot the victims and concluded that McLaughlin therefore failed to establish a mental illness defense under the M'Naghten rule codified at Minn.Stat. § 611.026 (2004). Following his conviction, McLaughlin appealed to this court. On appeal, he argues that in light of recent brain development research, the M'Naghten rule violates the Due Process Clause of the Minnesota Constitution as applied to adolescent defendants. McLaughlin also argues that the district court abused its discretion by denying a mid-trial continuance he sought in order to produce a rebuttal witness and by imposing permissive consecutive sentences for his two murder convictions. We affirm.

Appellant John Jason McLaughlin was charged in Stearns County with first- and second-degree murder in the deaths of two fellow Rocori High School students — Seth Bartell and Aaron Rollins. He was also charged with possession of a dangerous weapon on school property. The district court tried McLaughlin, who was 15 years old at the time of the murders, as an adult and found him guilty of all three counts following phase one of a bifurcated bench trial, during which the following facts were established.

On September 24, 2003, McLaughlin loaded his father's semiautomatic .22 caliber pistol, put it in a gym bag, and brought it to school with the intention to "shoot some people." Specifically, McLaughlin intended to "hurt" fellow ninth-grader Bartell, who, according to McLaughlin, was one of the students who teased him "all the time." Bartell and McLaughlin were in the same physical education class. Shortly before that class was to start, McLaughlin brought the gun to the boys' locker room and cocked it in the bathroom so no one would see it. He then hid the gun in his gym bag, sat on a bench, and waited for Bartell. Other students were getting ready for class in the locker room at this time. McLaughlin asked one of these students, R.S., where C.E., another student in the physical education class, was. R.S. responded that C.E. was gone that day.¹

Shortly thereafter, R.S. left the locker room with Bartell, who had changed clothes in an area of the locker room that McLaughlin could not see. McLaughlin followed R.S. and Bartell out of the locker room and into a hallway, where he fired the gun at and hit Bartell. Bartell grabbed his left side as he and R.S. continued down the hallway toward a staircase leading to a gymnasium. Meanwhile, McLaughlin cleared a jam in the gun and reloaded it. Before Bartell and R.S. reached the stairs, McLaughlin fired a second shot in Bartell's direction; this shot missed Bartell, but hit fellow student Aaron Rollins, who was walking toward McLaughlin. Rollins raised his hands toward the wound in his neck and as he started falling, said, "[h]elp me, I'm hurt. Help me, I've been shot."

As R.S. and Bartell climbed the stairs, Bartell lifted his shirt and said to R.S., "Look, I'm shot." R.S. and Bartell continued up the stairs and into the gym, looking for their physical education teacher. Shortly thereafter, McLaughlin entered the gym and approached Bartell. When McLaughlin was approximately two feet from Bartell, who had turned to face him, McLaughlin shot Bartell a second time, this time hitting him in the forehead. Student witnesses estimated that the gun was anywhere from one to eight inches from Bartell's head when McLaughlin pulled the trigger, but a forensic expert determined that the distance was approximately 18 inches to three feet. Bartell collapsed instantly, and McLaughlin started to walk away.

Physical education teacher Mark Johnson was completing some paperwork in the gym when McLaughlin shot Bartell the second time. As McLaughlin walked away from Bartell, Johnson stood up from his seat in the bleachers and first began to walk toward Bartell, and then toward McLaughlin. After Johnson took two or three steps toward McLaughlin, McLaughlin raised the gun and pointed it at Johnson. Johnson stopped immediately, raised his hand, and said "no" in a loud voice. McLaughlin then lowered the gun, ejected the remaining shells onto the floor, and dropped the gun. Johnson picked up the gun, grabbed McLaughlin by the wrist, and took him to the school office. Shortly thereafter, law enforcement officers arrived and transported McLaughlin to the police station.

While the officers dealt with McLaughlin, emergency response personnel attended to Bartell and Rollins. Attempts to revive Rollins through CPR were unsuccessful, and he was declared dead upon arrival at a St. Cloud hospital. Bartell underwent surgery soon after he arrived at the same hospital, but remained unconscious until his death 16 days later.

In an interview with Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) Agent Ken McDonald immediately after the shooting, McLaughlin initially admitted shooting Bartell in the basement, but moments later, he said that he thought his first shot missed Bartell. McLaughlin told McDonald that once he reached the gym, he "shot [Bartell] again" from a distance of five to six feet. When asked where he shot Bartell, McLaughlin responded, "I don't know, I think right here," and pointed toward his shoulder. McLaughlin told McDonald that he did not think he shot anyone other than Bartell, but he acknowledged that he might have, "if [he] missed, maybe." Midway through the interview, McDonald learned that one of the victims had died. When he relayed this information to McLaughlin, McLaughlin started to cry.

McLaughlin denied wanting to kill or "seriously hurt" anybody and told McDonald that he "was just trying to hurt [Bartell] like he hurt me." He said that he did not think a .22 gun would do "very much" harm.² McLaughlin also told McDonald that he started thinking about bringing a gun to school approximately one week earlier. He also said that two days before the shootings he checked the school for metal detectors and security cameras. Toward the end of the interview, McDonald asked McLaughlin, "Do you think you did something wrong today?" McLaughlin replied, "[y]eah."

McLaughlin told McDonald that his trouble with Bartell began in sixth grade, and that he was teased "basically about [his] zits and stuff." Of the 12 students who testified at McLaughlin's trial, including several of McLaughlin's friends, only two told the district court that they had ever observed any conflict between Bartell and McLaughlin. The conflicts these witnesses described involved pushing, yelling, and "talking," but not Bartell calling McLaughlin names or teasing him about his acne or anything else. Two students testified that C.E. called McLaughlin names such as "fag" and "asshole." But these witnesses qualified their testimony by stating that C.E. teased "everybody else" in the same manner, that C.E. was "just a kidding type of guy," and that the conflict between C.E. and McLaughlin was "nothing major." A third witness remembered one instance in which C.E. pushed McLaughlin out of the way by McLaughlin's locker, and McLaughlin responded by acting as if it did not happen.

The student who said he only saw Bartell and McLaughlin "talking" apparently testified to the grand jury that McLaughlin "was teased almost every day or every other day" and that "[Bartell] and his friends would go up to [McLaughlin] and they would just push him around." On cross-examination, this student agreed with defense counsel's statement that "[your grand jury testimony] was based mainly on rumors that you had heard." Another witness admitted on cross-examination that she had heard stories from other students about McLaughlin being teased, even though she never saw it happen. Defense counsel read from a statement this same witness gave to BCA agents on the day of the shooting, in which she said that McLaughlin "was a pretty good person and he got teased for a lot of things, for just a lot of things."

B.K., who knew McLaughlin since elementary school and developed a friendship with him in middle school, told the court that she exchanged e-mail messages with McLaughlin during the summer before ninth grade and after the school year started. During this time, McLaughlin told B.K. that he had a girlfriend named Suki Renoko, and he asked B.K. if she would exchange e-mail messages with Renoko. B.K. began to correspond with Renoko but she soon became suspicious that there was no such person and that Renoko was actually McLaughlin. She testified that the messages contained overly personal questions that typical 14-year-olds would not ask and had the same spelling errors as McLaughlin's messages. In one message from "Renoko," McLaughlin characterized himself as a "sniper." In another, he described an incident in which he cut the face of someone who stabbed his sister. Before classes began on the day of the shooting, McLaughlin e-mailed B.K. under his own name and wrote, "befor[e] [I] go to[o] far [I] have to ask you not to tell any one about this not the news cops or parents ok * * * so [I] guess this is goodbye my love." ...