Judges ask if Auman still fleeing when cop was shot

Question critical in appeal of murder conviction in death of officer shot by her accomplice

Karen Abbott, News Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 1, 2002

Appeals court judges Tuesday asked hard questions of the state lawyer working to keep Lisl Auman in prison for life for a murder that occurred while she sat handcuffed and locked in the rear of a police car.

Auman, 26, is seeking a new trial in the killing of police officer Bruce VanderJagt.

Auman had enlisted Matthaeus Jaehnig, a small-time criminal with a violent past she met the night before, to help in a burglary Nov. 12, 1997.

Auman had been captured when Jaehnig shot VanderJagt before killing himself.

"She set in motion this chain of actions that led to Officer VanderJagt having his head blown off," Assistant Attorney General Paul Koehler told three Colorado Court of Appeals judges.

Koehler said Auman still was "in flight" even later, when she was questioned at the police station, because she continued to lie about what had happened and who was involved.

That prompted Judge Raymond Jones to ask, "Does flight ever end?"

"Surely something brings flight to a close," Jones told Koehler. "Is it possible that a person's arrest, handcuffing and removal from the scene does that?"

The judges took the appeal under advisement without indicating when they will rule.

Auman, who remained in prison and did not attend the hearing, was convicted and sentenced under the "felony murder" doctrine.

In Colorado, that law holds that the death of anyone during a serious crime or the "immediate flight" afterward makes everyone involved in the original crime guilty of murder -- no matter who did the actual killing, and no matter even if the death occurred in an accidental traffic crash.

Defense attorney Kathleen Lord argued that the felony murder doctrine doesn't apply to Auman because her flight from the burglary was over when VanderJagt died.

By then, she had been in police custody for five to 10 minutes.

Lord said the Denver judge who presided over Auman's trial should have given the jury instructions about what the law means by "immediate flight" and whether Auman's flight was over by the time VanderJagt was killed as she sat in the police car.

That failure to instruct made the trial unfair, Lord argued.

Auman's arrest might have ended her flight had she greeted the police with relief and told them where Jaehnig was, Koehler said. But she didn't.

"She told multiple lies afterward to help her friends escape," Koehler said.

"Mere custody did not stop her participation in this crime," Koehler said.

But Judge John Webb interrupted. "The officer was already dead, as was Jaehnig," he said. "So what difference did it make . . . what she said to the police officers?"

Koehler said Auman's lies made a difference because Colorado's felony murder statute is "extremely broad."

And, he said, it didn't matter whether Auman was still in flight when Jaehnig shot the officer, because Jaehnig was.

He said Colorado law provides that anyone's flight is the operative circumstance, not any specific defendant's flight.

Lord argued that it doesn't.

She also said the lawyers' continuing debate over the meaning of "immediate flight" makes it clear that the Auman jury must have been confused about it.

"And that makes my case -- that the jury in this case needed additional instructions," Lord said.

"It's not due process to say, 'Jurors, whatever you think,' " she said. "It's not enough."

Contact Karen Abbott at (303) 892-5188 or abbottk@RockyMountainNews.com.