Colorado jury acquits Army Green Beret who killed intruder

Why is it the perps always have the same look — “badass” facial hair (”soul patch” common), vacant eyes, a look that says “jackass” from a mile away. Someone could run all the perps images through a computer program and generate your generic picture of a lowlife.

“Adolph battled many demons in his life, resulting in his violent and undeserved death. Although he faced many challenges in his life, we will remember him as a wounded, decorated war veteran, and aspiring artist. He will no longer suffer from the pain and sorrow that haunted him throughout much of his life.”

Adolph battled many demons in his life . . . . .
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I would say the first demon was his name. How could anyone in their right mind name their child Adolph.

I feel sorry for Adolph and his family but Adolph brought this upon himself. The out building was on the same property as the house, to me it is covered by castle doctrine.

Prison face.

Well done! Shame on the state for taking it to trial.

By “Solid Castle Doctrine”, I meant that the Jury enforced Solid Castle Doctrine, not that the law did.

Thanks for clarifying that. i agree with you and glad the jury did the right thing. for other posters we spent at least 30 min in every legal aspects of concealed carry class i have taken in going into detail on Castle Doctrine. LEGALLY, detached buildings are not covered by Castle Doctrine. Common Sense suggests otherwise.

Dan May, the DA, is actually quite conservative

Naw, this kind of activity cancels his conservative card, if he ever had one, he doesn't even Talk the Talk very well considering his comments about the prosecution and jury, let alone Walk the Walk.

CINO is the best he could claim.

Katenda retires and the whole place goes to hell.

The Hitler family appreciates your condolences.

Thanks, Catnip,

Comprehensive article on Colorado "Make My Day" Law: Should Colorado's Make My Day law be expanded?

From that article by Alan Prendergast in Westword, this incident was discussed on FR:

The national coverage of (the Colorado) Make My Day soon took an even nastier turn, spurred by one particularly grim case that seemed to embody critics' worst fears about the new law. One night in the spring of 1986, a long-simmering feud among neighbors on Pearl Court in Northglenn erupted into bloodshed — and headlines.

For months, a frequently unemployed delivery driver named David Guenther had been involved in a series of petty disputes with other residents of the block, about everything from kids messing with his rock garden to others' unkempt yards to noise and parking issues. Guenther had put a sign on his front door, declaring that "the owner of this property is armed and prepared to protect life, liberty and property from criminal attack," but his badass approach just seemed to trigger more taunting.

On the night it all went ballistic, three neighbors who'd been drinking beer at the home of Michael and Josslyn Volosin decided it would be fun to let the air out of the tires of Guenther's car. One of them loudly invited Guenther to come out and fight, calling him a "big pussy." Guenther apparently slept through the commotion. His wife Pam called the police, but by the time they arrived the men were gone, and she declined to file a complaint. Hearing the loud party down the block, the two officers stopped by the Volosins' place to urge them to keep things under control, then left.

Police would later gather conflicting stories about what happened next. Michael Volosin claimed he heard someone kicking his door, figured it was Guenther and went over to his house to complain. He got into a confrontation at the Guenthers' front door with Pam, who claimed that Volosin pulled her outside and started to beat her. They both fell into the bushes.

Pam called out to her husband for help. David Guenther emerged from the house with a .357 Magnum in his hand and fired four times. He would later tell police that he shot randomly in the dark, trying to scare people away, and couldn't really distinguish among the "shapes" around him. If so, he was randomly deadly. He hit Volosin in the wrist and the leg. He shot a man who was headed toward the melee, Robbie Wardell, in the abdomen. And the fourth bullet hit Josslyn Volosin in the chest as she was trying to separate Pam Guenther and her husband.

Wardell and Michael Volosin survived. Josslyn died in the street.

Three months later, Adams County District Judge Philip Roan shocked the neighbors by tossing the case against Guenther out of court, saying the Make My Day law made it impossible to charge him. "It is a license for homeowners to kill without the possibility of being held accountable," Roan declared. "The court finds the statute in question is the most ill-considered statute this court has ever seen.... I think it's ridiculous."

An outraged neighbor wrote a letter to Judge Roan, informing him that Guenther had "been involved in at least two other incidents with a gun in which charges were also dropped.... How many times does he get to threaten someone with a gun or how many more people does he have to shoot in order to be put away?"

Prosecutors immediately appealed Roan's ruling. The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the Make My Day law but decided that Roan had misapplied it in Guenther's case. The charges were reinstated, much to the relief of Jim Brandon, who says actions like Guenther's fall outside the scope of Make My Day: "He was out in the yard shooting people. The law doesn't cover that."

Guenther received the news stoically. He was no longer talking about random shots; instead, he told the Rocky Mountain News that he "did what I thought was right" and "eliminated everybody in the yard who shouldn't have been there." He made these remarks from an Adams County jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on another homicide charge — the murder of his wife, Pam, and the wounding of her male companion outside a Commerce City restaurant, ten months after the Volosin shooting.

Pam had obtained a restraining order against her husband in early 1987, claiming that he'd beaten and abused her. David subsequently forced his way into the house and held her hostage at gunpoint for several hours before surrendering to police. Incredibly, he was able to bond out of jail for a mere $10,000. Terrified, Pam fled with her two children to a safehouse. But Guenther caught up with her a week later and gunned her down in front of their children.

The slaying shocked domestic-violence crusaders, who argued that the delay in prosecuting Guenther for his previous rampage merely encouraged him to spin out of control. A jury eventually acquitted Guenther in the killing of Josslyn Volosin — not under Make My Day, but through a tortured interpretation of established self-defense law. He was not so fortunate with the jury in Pam's death. They found him guilty of first-degree murder, and the judge gave him forty years to life.

The Guenther case became the focus of a 1988 PBS Frontline documentary; it also received detailed attention in a 1990 study of the new law prepared by William Wilbanks, a Florida criminologist. Wilbanks was skeptical of the benefits of Make My Day. His review of the first 23 Colorado cases in which the law was invoked as a defense found that most of them involved domestic violence, feuds among friends and neighbors or disputes among drug dealers — not unknown intruders seeking to rob or assault a homeowner. In fact, in only three of the cases was the intruder a stranger to the home defender, and in all of those, the "intruders" were police officers.

"An examination of the 20 cases involving non-strangers suggests that the homeowners used force (sometimes deadly force) as much out of anger as self-defense," Wilbanks wrote. He urged several clarifications in the language of the bill — including a distinction between intruders making "uninvited entry" and peace officers acting within the scope of their duties — that were never adopted.

At the same time, Wilbanks acknowledged that the law might be having some positive impact. While there are too many variables involved to draw a simple line of cause and effect, the burglary rate in Colorado declined significantly during the first three years that Make My Day was on the books — a slight increase in 1986, then a 13 percent decline in 1987, followed by a 10 percent drop in 1988.

In Denver, where the uproar over the Guenther case was almost impossible to ignore, police were taking nearly a third fewer burglary reports at the end of that period than they had before the law existed.

Odo: You’d shoot a man in the back?
Barak: Well it’s the safest way isn’t it?

ST:DS9