State v. Janes

In 1988, 17-year-old Andrew Janes (defendant) shot and killed his stepfather, Walter Jaloveckas. Jaloveckas moved in with Andrew’s mother, Gale Janes, when Andrew was seven, and over time, Jaloveckas became increasingly emotionally and physically abusive toward the Janeses. The night before Andrew shot Jaloveckas, Jaloveckas yelled at Gale for nearly an hour, and Jaloveckas was still angry when Jaloveckas left for work the following morning. Before school, Andrew showed a friend a loaded shotgun and said that he planned to kill Jaloveckas. Andrew left school early and raided Jaloveckas’s locked supply of alcohol, marijuana, and guns. A few hours later, Janes shot Jaloveckas as Jaloveckas walked through the front door. Andrew then intentionally triggered the home-alarm system to summon police and fired at police and parked cars, slightly injuring one police officer and a bystander. Andrew filed a pretrial motion to present a self-defense argument at trial and introduce expert testimony from Dr. Bruce Olson that Andrew had experienced battered-child syndrome (BCS). Olson would have testified in part that BCS makes children hypervigilant to a batterer’s behavior, making battered children able to notice subtle behavioral changes that the average unabused person may not notice. The trial court denied Andrew’s motion, reasoning that there was no imminent threat at the time Andrew murdered Jaloveckas to support a self-defense theory, and thus BCS could not support Andrew’s self-defense theory. However, the trial court permitted Andrew to raise a diminished-capacity defense, and Olson provided non-BCS testimony to support that defense. The jury convicted Andrew of second-degree murder and two counts of second-degree assault for shooting at police and the bystander. Andrew appealed from his conviction, arguing that the trial court had erred by excluding his BCS evidence and self-defense theory.