< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
To some extent, justice was served last week when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Lisl Auman should get a new trial. She had been serving a life sentence without possibility of parole after her 1998 conviction for the felony murder of Bruce VanderJagt, a Denver police officer. Auman was handcuffed in the back of a police car at the time of the murder. The person who actually shot and killed VanderJagt was a skinhead named Matthaeus Jaehnig, and he killed himself after killing VanderJagt.
Those killings on Nov. 12, 1997 were an ugly event during an ugly time of skinhead violence in Denver. Had Auman been sentenced to a few supervised years for general bad judgement and misconduct in the way she went about retrieving her goods from an ex-boyfriend's apartment, the system would have seemed fair. After all, a woman riding with one Jerald D. Allen -- who at about the same time fired 47 shots at pursuing police while he drove a stolen car -- got 2 1/2 years of probation, and that's about the size of Auman's real crime.
But the sad fact was that a police officer was down, and so somebody had to pay. Jaehnig was dead and beyond the reach of Denver DA Bill Ritter, and so his office turned to Auman for the demonstration.
They couldn't exactly try her for murder, but if they could show that she had instigated a felony, and the shootings were the outcome of that felony, then she was as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger.
Part of the logic behind the felony-murder law is sound. If you agree to be the driver while your gang robs a convenience store, and they kill the clerk, you're certainly a party to the crime even if you were sitting in the car when the trigger was pulled.
But prosecutors can stretch it far past that. I saw it myself about a decade ago when a local kid, Jeremy Denison, was convicted of the felony murder of Richard Johnson. Denison argued self-defense, and at worst it looked like a clear case of manslaughter -- a fight got out of hand, and somebody died.
Johnson was a police informant, a soldier in the vile War on Drugs. He'd gotten into trouble in Alamosa, where he cut a deal that would keep him out of prison if he'd come up here and find ways to get Salida kids into trouble. It's hard enough to raise kids without this kind of help from the local police department -- bringing in a steroid dealer with a flashy car to impress teenagers. Especially a guy who could threaten a local merchant with a shotgun, which the local police ignored since he was, after all, their soldier.
So when Johnson ended up dead on a back road near an abandoned quarry about ten miles out of town, the DA couldn't just charge manslaughter. That wouldn't send the right message.
But to get felony murder, the prosecutors had to prove that Denison killed Johnson in the course of another crime. So they said that Denison, as a passenger while Johnson was driving, persuaded him to go up a back road to smoke a joint, all the while intending to stab him to death and steal the flashy Trans-Am.
However, Johnson's car had run out of gas the preceding night, and he'd dispatched Denison with a gas can to get it that morning. If Denison had auto theft on his mind, why didn't he just take it then?
To keep the jury from thinking about such matters, the prosecution kept alluding to a Metallica concert and a satanic cult that was supposedly ensnaring Salida kids, and then told the jurors that only they were in a position to stop this horror. I felt certain that the jurors would see through this hobgoblin crap, but I was wrong. The conviction came quickly and Denison has been in prison ever since.
Jeremy Denison did cause Richard Johnson's death, but all I ever saw was a case for manslaughter. Lisl Auman did do some stupid and perhaps criminal things, but she was not a murderer.
The news reports, after the Supreme Court decision last week, had prosecutors rejoicing because the Supreme Court had, after all, upheld the felony-murder law. Perhaps they should celebrate, since they can continue to go after those front-page show-trial convictions where the punishment far exceeds the actual crime.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >