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4.2.12
WC: 191694

serialized gang murder. Peter Rosier was indicted on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder. The prosecution’s theory was that the stepfather’s ultimate act was merely the final stage in a family conspiracy of which Peter was the architect and participant.

Suddenly Peter Rosier found himself in jail, facing a possible death sentence in a state that has one of the highest execution rates in the country. Right wing commentators, such as Patrick Buchanan, compared what Peter did to what the Nazis had done under Hitler.⁷¹ Rosier called me from prison on the day of his arrest and asked me to help him. I worked with his local lawyer to get him out on bail and to formulate a trial strategy. In the event of his conviction, I was to be his appellate lawyer.

First we had to establish through scientific evidence that suffocation, rather than morphine, was the immediate cause of death, since Rosier did not suffocate Patricia. (Cancer was, of course, the “but for” cause of death.) Second, we had to make the jurors wonder what they would have done under such excruciating circumstances and to conclude that the criminal law should not sit in judgment over loving family members who had to make a tragic choice between keeping a promise to a comatose loved one or abandoning her in a moment of crisis.

Peter’s trial lawyer, Stanley Rosenblatt of Miami, did an excellent job persuading the jury that the murder statutes were put on the books not for loving husbands like Peter Rosier but for brutal killers like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. He tried the case with emotion and empathy, inviting the jurors to put themselves in the unenviable situation Peter faced on that terrible night. The prosecutor, on the defensive for having given Patricia’s stepfather immunity before he knew the facts, played the avenging angel. He demanded that the jurors simply apply the law to the facts and not distinguish among murders on the basis of motive.

The jury understood—even if the prosecutors and Pat Buchanan did not—the differences between love and hate, between a self-willed voluntary death and a death involuntarily imposed by others. After weeks of trial, it took the jury only a few hours to acquit Peter Rosier of all criminal liability. The prosecution had lost all credibility by asking the jury to treat Dr. Rosier as if he were the functional equivalent of a gangland killer. Had the prosecution charged Dr. Rosier with assisting the suicide of another—which is a crime under Florida law—it might have had a better shot at a conviction. But by overcharging him with first-degree murder, it made it difficult for the jury to take its case as anything but a vendetta.

One important role the jury plays in our system of justice is to serve as the moral conscience of the community and as the common sense moderator of harsh general statutes. This Florida jury, which included several older people who themselves had living wills, decided that what Peter Rosier did, was not murder, even if the strict letter of the law did not authorize him to help his wife choose the time and manner of her imminent death.

⁷¹ A strange analogy for Buchanan who has expressed admiration for Hitler and doubt that the Nazis gassed Jews during the Holocaust.

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