Jeremy Petschow served seven years of a 264-year sentence for allegedly burglarizing homes, stealing cars and shooting a homeowner who caught someone in his basement.
I have no take on his guilt or innocence.
But a judge in El Paso County lifted his conviction last week after his trial lawyer apparently showed up wasted in her courtroom.
“Everyone has a fundamental right to effective counsel,” said public defender Doug Wilson. “That includes someone who is sober.”
Colorado Springs attorney Patrick Smith is a former federal public defender claiming years of trial experience. Earlier this month, he registered with a 0.158 percent blood- alcohol content when District Judge Theresa Cisneros suspected he was drunk while testifying about his work for Petschow.
That’s almost twice the legal limit for driving.
Go figure that he didn’t return phone calls for this column.
Petschow hired Smith to defend him against charges of attempted murder, burglary and other crimes related to the break-ins in El Paso County.
Smith didn’t gather most records in the case and “did not do any investigation into the facts,” wrote Cisneros, who presided over the 2001 trial.
Smith met with his client for less than three hours, Cisneros found, and didn’t inform his client about other charges against him.
“He filed no motions,” the judge wrote. And “he failed to object to an overwhelming amount of inadmissible and prejudicial evidence” in a case in which even the DA’s investigator thought evidence showed another man was the shooter.
“He knew less than a TV lawyer,” says Tom Carberry, a legal expert in Petschow’s appeal.
“The Court finds that Mr. Petschow is more credible than Mr. Smith,” concluded the judge, who lifted Petschow’s conviction and scheduled a new trial in August. “Mr. Smith was sarcastic, combative, smelled like alcohol and the results of the portable breathalyzer show that he was intoxicated at the hearing.”
As for Smith, he’s on inactive status with the state Supreme Court after records show other judges chastised him for coming to court in a similar state.
Does it take a blotto lawyer, I wonder, to win a new trial in El Paso County?
Inmate Tim Kennedy appears back in court there Monday in the appeal of his double-murder conviction. DNA tests give credence to his claim that he didn’t kill his friends Steve Staskiewicz and Jennifer Carpenter in 1991.
Kennedy, too, had sorry trial representation by a lawyer who, among other oversights, never investigated two witnesses who faced trial at the time of the killings for having raped Carpenter. Both witnesses, Rebecca Corkins and Charles Stroud, have said they wanted to silence Carpenter’s testimony before their trials. The defense also failed to question several witnesses who said that Stroud and Corkins confessed to them.
Kennedy’s quest for a new trial — as well as that of exoneree Tim Masters — was turned down by the Colorado Innocence Project, an outfit run by a lawyer who says he doesn’t believe there are innocent people in Colorado prisons.
“There has to be a way for courts to go after the victims of inept attorneys and a reliable safety net for people to appeal their convictions,” says Carberry. “You never hear of our Innocent Project ever doing anything to really help anybody.”
Let’s hope it doesn’t take more courtroom boozing to convince Kennedy’s judge, Thomas Kane, to reconsider his conviction.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
