Joshua Aide (PHOTO: Courtesy Winnebago Co. Jail)
OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – A court rejected Joshua Aide’s appeal for a new trial on his convictions for shooting his ex-girlfriend, fatally shooting her father, and shooting another man in Oshkosh.
Aide is serving life in prison without the chance of parole for the Aug. 4, 2020, murder of James Gruettner and the shootings of Rebecca Borkowski and John Miller at a home in Minnesota Street.
On appeal, Aide argued that he received ineffective assistance of counsel because his trial counsel failed to present sufficient evidence of Aide’s mental health conditions to support his theory of self-defense.
But in the nine-page decision issued Wednesday, the Court of Appeals rejected Aide’s arguments.
“In sum, Aide attempts to show ineffective assistance of counsel based on trial counsel’s failure to investigate and put on expert testimony regarding Aide’s psychopathologies and their apparent impact on his ability to perceive threats. He argues that if the jury had been given this information, it likely would have embraced Aide’s perfect self-defense argument and found him not guilty of first-degree intentional homicide. While a defendant’s subjective belief is admissible to show imperfect self-defense, Aide fails to persuade us that this type of subjective evidence would be admissible to demonstrate the objective reasonableness of a defendant’s assessment of a threat. Because Aide’s unique approach to perfect self-defense is unsettled, trial counsel did not perform deficiently. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of conviction and postconviction order denying Aide’s motion for a new trial,” the court ruled.
Aide is currently housed at the Redgranite Correctional Institution, state records show.
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