Lawyers spar over role of Asperger's syndrome in school slaying

March 6, 2008 01:58 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE -- John Odgren once brought a toy plastic gun and a pen knife to school and claimed in a forensics class that he could “commit the perfect murder,” according to school records discussed today during a hearing in Middlesex Superior Court.

Odgren’s mother talked about her son’s violent thoughts with school officials, and she said he tried to put her at ease. “I’m not going to kill anybody,” Odgren told his mother, according to a lawyer quoting from the school records.

Prosecutors said that his fascination with weapons and the idle threat to kill came before the teenager used a 14-inch kitchen knife to fatally stab another student through the heart in a fury in a Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School bathroom. The new details emerged today during a hearing in which Odgren’s attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, asked a judge to throw out the first-degree murder indictment for the slaying of James Alenson on Jan. 19, 2007. Judge Isaac Borenstein took the motion under advisement and did not indicate when he would issue a ruling.

Odgren, a lanky 17-year-old with peach fuzz on his upper lip, sat passively and watched as lawyers argued over his Asperger's syndrome and the role it played in the slaying. “That’s going to be hotly debated at trial,” Borenstein said.

Shapiro maintained that a prosecutor cut off a grand juror’s questioning about his client’s syndrome. Asperger's makes it impossible for Odgren to have planned the killing, Shapiro said, and premeditation is a key component of a first-degree murder charge.

“One of the facets of Asperger's syndrome is often an obsession with weapons and so on,” Shapiro said. “That would undermine the idea that this was premeditated.”

If the grand jury had learned more about Asperger's syndrome, they may have indicted Odgren with second-degree murder or manslaughter, Shapiro argued. “The district attorney told them they could not consider” Asperger's syndrome, he said. “We think that is wrong.”

Assistant Middlesex District Attorney Daniel J. Bennett argued that grand jurors had ample access to information about Asperger's syndrome in the thousands of pages of Odgren’s school records they reviewed during their investigation. Bennett said that Odgren waited in a bathroom and killed another student whom he didn’t know. The attack was so vicious, Bennett said, that Odgren plunged the knife into Alenson five times, including one blow that buried the blade so deep in his chest it nearly came out his back.

“The evidence of premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty is overwhelming,” Bennett said.