lewrockwell.com / By William Norman Grigg / January 30, 2013
Sheriff Terry Maketa of Colorado’s El Paso County has promised his constituents that he “will actively oppose any effort that infringes upon your second amendment rights.”
“Like every elected official in the state, I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Colorado,” wrote Maketa in an open letter to El Paso County residents. “This means all rights.”
That promise apparently doesn’t apply to the right of an unarmed citizen to defend himself against acts of criminal violence committed by one of Maketas deputies. If it did, Maketa – who, like every other sheriff, has some discretion regarding prosecutions – would have urged the local prosecutor to drop all charges against Calhan, Colorado resident David Goss, a sod farmer who is now serving an unjustified four-year prison sentence for the supposed crime of trying to avoid being shot in the stomach by Deputy Jeff Schulz.
On the evening of June 16, 2011, Deputy Schulz responded to a call from a woman who had been chased away by Goss after she and several friends accidentally trespassed on his farm. In the weeks leading up to that incident, Goss – who would later be described by a trial judge as “a pillar of his community” – had suffered a series of robberies and received no help from the Sheriff’s Office. He was sitting in his pickup at the end of a long driveway when Schulz arrived. Owing to his understandable frustration, Goss had been abrupt and inhospitable in dealing with the unwanted visitors, and his mood didn’t improve when Schulz showed up.
According to Shulz’s original account of the confrontation, Goss approached his vehicle in a “menacing” fashion, which prompted the officer to whirl around and shoot him with a Taser. Goss was not a criminal suspect. After being attacked without cause on his own property, Goss removed the Taser barbs and then knocked the weapon out of the assailant’s hands. This act of self-defense was later described as the supposed crime of “disarming an officer.”
A struggle then ensued in which the deputy – despite being larger and younger than the farmer – supposedly wound up pinned to the ground on his back as Goss repeatedly beat him with his own radio and threatened to kill him. At that point, Schulz – supposedly fearing for his life – shot the unarmed and already traumatized farmer in self-defense.
