The ‘activist attorney’ who changed state law to free Steven Dinsmore

When appellate attorney Richard Braucher agreed to take on Steven Dinsmore’s case, he says two things were immediately clear to him: It was the right thing to do and he would lose. Reading through a transcript of Dinsmore’s May 20, 2022, re-sentencing hearing, Braucher says he was struck first by how Dinsmore’s sincerity jumped off the page, noting how Dinsmore interrupted Humboldt County Superior Court Judge John Feeney, the man who’d sentenced him in 2007 to serve more than 30 years in prison for assaulting a sheriff’s deputy with a firearm in 2005, to thank him, saying incarceration had saved his life. Second, Braucher says, he was struck by the fact that Dinsmore not only represented himself as rehabilitated but brought evidence — his GED and certificates from self-improvement courses completed while in custody, letters from prison guards and instructors, and a record that had been clean of writeups for the better part of a decade. Third, Braucher says, he was affected by Feeney’s response, noting Feeney had presided over Dinsmore’s initial trial and knew all the details of his crimes from when he handed down the 30-year sentence but now viewed the man appearing before him via Zoom from a state prison as changed, rehabilitated, deserving of another chance at a free life. But Braucher says he also knew the law and that the appeal the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office filed immediately after that 2022 hearing — and even days before Dinsmore was released from a state prison in Coalinga into the loving arms of his parents after more than 17 years of incarceration — was ironclad. Judges didn’t have the jurisdiction to recall and resentence state prison inmates, Braucher says, and the law allowing judges to strike firearms enhancements like the one used in Dinsmore’s case was not written to be applied retroactively. “It was obvious from the very beginning to me that the judge had no jurisdiction and that Steve was staring down the barrel of a gun, basically, and he was going to be going back to prison,” says Braucher, who has practiced appellate law for more than 25 years. “I don’t want to make a long speech out of it but that really impacted me in ways that I had not been impacted before. It was just utterly unjust that a district attorney could request the recall and reconsideration of a sentence but…