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Blessed and Bewildered

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"I prayed about it," Rosenthal says. And he decided to run, filing the very day Holmes announced his retirement.

Holmes says he figures that Rosenthal, like himself, "ran for D.A. in self-defense."

By e-mail, the retired D.A. says, "I never wanted to be an elected official," but Carol Vance announced his retirement. "I knew if someone else became D.A. I would be either leaving or going down a few notches, either of which I saw as unsatisfactory. I suspect Chuck was in the same boat."

Rosenthal's campaign emphasized his tightness with Holmes. While his opponents didn't criticize Holmes, Rosenthal still encountered a brutal primary fight against former district judge Patricia Lykos and then-first assistant county attorney Mike Stafford, who has since become county attorney.

"I was not at all prepared for the divisiveness that there was within the Republican Party," Rosenthal says. "You were either automatically accepted in a crowd because of who supported you or you could walk into a room and almost cut the animosity with a knife because of who supported you. And I found that odd. I was not ready at all for that."

Rosenthal's key supporters were the Christian right -- the Hotze-Blakemore axis, which has been pushing conservative candidates for years, and the 20,000 members of Second Baptist, a "damn powerful machine on their own," according to veteran political consultant Nancy Sims. They carried him to a runoff victory for the nomination.

Some of Rosenthal's former colleagues recall no religious fervor from the man -- his wife calls him "a quiet Christian" -- but there's no doubt that he now often invokes his faith. To some, that's pandering, and also the reason behind his decision to argue the sodomy case. To others, it's just the way he is.

But it can be jarring talking to the head of the country's most vigorous death penalty prosecutors and hear him talk of the Bible justifying his work.

He says the death penalty is "biblical." What about forgiveness?

"Forgiveness, it's not up to me to forgive. It's in that covenant where God talks about 'man sheds another man's blood, you shed his blood.' And the only thing God can't do is contradict himself, and I believe that Jesus is God and when he says on the Sermon on the Mount that he didn't come to change the law but to fulfill it, he wasn't changing the rules."

He doesn't believe those who sincerely repent on death row should be spared. "Actually I take heart in people who say they find religion in prison before they're executed because as far as I know, the mortality rate for human beings is 100 percent, so it's gonna happen to us sooner or later anyway, and hopefully they meet their maker as a better person," he says.

It was Rosenthal's decision to seek the death penalty against Andrea Yates, the disturbed Clear Lake woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub. The jury instead gave a life sentence.

"It was not an easy decision," Rosenthal says. "But I felt like it was a situation where, given the savagery of the murders, that a jury ought to have the opportunity to consider the death penalty."

He says he received death threats after he decided to make it a capital case. "It would be mostly e-mails, and they'd be sent about three o'clock in the morning from Massachusetts or California," he says.

Another death penalty case could pose problems for Rosenthal. The state Court of Criminal Appeals on July 3 appointed former justice Michael McCormick to determine if Anibal Garcia Rousseau deserves a new trial after 14 years on death row. Rosenthal sat as second chair in that case because it was prosecutor Lorraine Parker's first capital case.

Rousseau was convicted of capital murder on the basis of eyewitness testimony; there was little physical evidence. After the trial, Rousseau's attorneys discovered that the gun prosecutors claimed to be the murder weapon bore no resemblance to the actual murder weapon, according to HPD tests. They claim either the police or the D.A.'s office knew of the discrepancy at trial but kept the evidence hidden.

It was news to Parker.

"I was pretty horrified to learn that the gun that had been recovered and was in the custody of the HPD did not match the eyewitness description," she says. "It's the obligation and the duty of all prosecutors to see that justice is done, not just to get convictions. It's clear to me justice was not done here."

Parker now practices civil law in Colorado and is a fervent death penalty opponent. She says she doesn't know enough about the case to lay blame for what happened.

Attorney Philip Hilder represents Rousseau, and he too doesn't say just who is at fault. "I'm lumping the two [HPD and the D.A.'s office] together -- they may share in the blame or not, but it doesn't matter who. It's just a critical failing to disclose critical evidence…I want to get Mr. Rosenthal on the stand to answer some very tough questions as to why this information in 14 years was never communicated."

Rosenthal says he and his office did nothing wrong and passed on to the defense all they knew at the time of the trial.

But some defense attorneys say the case is worrisome because…well, because they have doubts about it that they wouldn't have with Holmes. Many echo Dan Cogdell's concerns: "Johnny Holmes was more old-school, he was more black-and-white, right's-right-and-wrong's-wrong," he says. "You don't get that same sense from Chuck."

Others disagree. "Chuck always struck me as having a straight moral compass," says defense attorney Chris Downey, who worked under Rosenthal until 1998. "That's why I'm so surprised at what's going on with the DNA lab."

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