Eglehoff case had gone to U.S. Supreme Court

A man serving a 42-year prison sentence for killing two people during a drunken mushroom-picking trip in the Yaak area in 1992 was approved for entrance into a pre-release worker inmate program on Wednesday.

According to Montana Board of Pardons and Parole Director Timothy Allred, that means that James Allen Egelhoff, 54, will be able to get a job, save for an apartment and begin making other transitional steps toward being released back into the general public.

“It will help him transition back into the community,” Allred said.

 Egelhoff will have to be reviewed by the parole board again before he is released. He is currently sent to be re-evaluated by the board in November 2016.

Egelhoff was convicted of two counts of deliberate homicide and a subsequent account of committing a felony with a dangerous weapon after he killed Roberta Pavlova and John Christenson in a case that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Egelhoff was found early in the morning on July 13, 1992, by authorities after someone reported that a station wagon had been driving erratically. The station wagon was found crashed in a ditch, with the bodies of Christenson and Pavlova in the front seats. Each had died of a single gunshot wound to the head.

Egelhoff was in the back seat of the vehicle, screaming obscenities. Egelhoff had gunpowder residue on his hands and the crime weapon was found in the vehicle.

An hour after he was transported to the hospital a blood draw was done and his blood alcohol concentration was determined to be .36, more than four times the legal limit to drive.

Egelhoff used his extreme intoxication as a defense at trial, saying that he had been so drunk that he would have been incapable of shooting Pavlova and Christenson and that he had no memory of the crime.

A medical professional testified that it was likely that Egelhoff “blacked out” during the evening of the crime.

Mental state was an important part of the defense because deliberate homicide must be committed “purposefully” or “knowingly” per state statute.

In response, prosecutors presented evidence that Egelhoff had used a stick to push the accelerator from the back seat to drive the car. He also was combative with officers and had the dexterity to kick a camera out of the hands of a deputy trying to take his photo, prosecutors argued. If Egelhoff was capable of such tasks, then he was capable of murder, the prosecution claimed.

The jury was instructed to not take Egelhoff’s blood alcohol level into consideration during deliberations, because the District Court found that Montana was one of 10 states at the time that had not carved out legislation permitting an intoxication defense.

The conviction of 84 years, with half of that time suspended, was overturned by the Montana Supreme Court.

The U.S. Solicitor General’s Office appealed to the nation’s highest court and won by a 5-4 margin, reinstating Egelhoff’s 42-year sentence.

The majority of the court held that the British common law system governing the American court system had long recognized that drunkenness was not a defense to committing a crime. The opinion quoted an 1820 United States Supreme Court decision where drunkenness was used as a defense.

“This is the first time, that I ever remember it to have been contended, that the commission of one crime was an excuse for another,” Justice Joseph Story wrote in United States v. Cornell. “Drunkenness is a gross vice, and in the contemplation of some of our laws is a crime; and I learned in my earlier studies, that so far from its being in law an excuse for murder, it is rather an aggravation of its malignity.”

While some states had exceptions for committing crimes while intoxicated, Montana was not among them, the court held in a 1996 ruling.

Egelhoff is currently housed at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.