Jason Abbott was 18 years old in March of 2008 when he went on what was described as a homicidal rampage at his home on Monastery Street in Sitka.
Abbott – whose name is now Roger Teas – used a hunting knife to kill four family members and seriously injure another.
His grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle all died at the scene. His grandmother later died in the hospital. His assault on an aunt who fled out into the street was interrupted by arriving police, who subsequently disarmed Abbot and put him into custody – where he has been ever since.
In February, 2010, Abbott pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, and one count of first degree assault. Sitka Superior Court Judge David George sentenced Teas to a composite sentence of 140 years in prison, and entered a finding of “guilty but mentally ill.”
Abbott immediately appealed the sentence as excessive, but the Alaska Court of Appeals rejected his claims, and affirmed his sentence.
In 2016, Abbott tried another tack looking for post-conviction relief, and asked the superior court to “vacate the plea, sentence, and the guilty-but-mentally-ill designation.” The superior court dismissed his application, however, on the grounds that it was too late, having been filed more than one-year after the Court of Appeals had already affirmed his conviction.
More recently, under his new name of Roger Teas, he argued that his sentence was illegal, and that the “guilty-but-mentally-ill” statute was not correctly implemented. Teas’s case was argued by the Anchorage Public Defender’s office, which claimed that his “guilty-but-mentally-ill plea” was invalid, without an administrative means of “hospitalizing and therapeutically mitigating” defendants.
In its October 23, 2024, ruling the Court of Appeals rejected that argument, saying Teas cannot claim to have been illegally sentenced, as it would have required the superior court to consider “matters outside the sentencing record,” or in other words, it would require the court to consider evidence about how the Department of Corrections is implementing the guilty-but-mentally-ill statute.
Although the justices didn’t buy Teas’s argument this time, they left the door open for yet another try, saying “We express no opinion on whether, assuming there is some merit to Teas’s underlying complaint about how the Department has implemented his sentence, Teas might be entitled to relief through some other procedural mechanism.”
Roger Teas – formerly known as Jason Abbott – remains in custody at in the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, the Alaska Department of Corrections’ maximum-security prison.
