Canney’s Gambit

A few years ago, Iraq War veteran Thomas Labosky was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder, second-degree assault, menacing and kidnapping for what the Chaffee County sheriff called an “unprovoked attack” on an unsuspecting victim on the Midland Trail outside of Buena Vista.

Criminal defense lawyer Randy Canney heard a more nuanced story. Labosky told him he was out for a day of biking and climbing when he heard gunfire at the intersection of five bike trails. He spotted a man holding a handgun.

“Words were exchanged,” Canney says. “Who started what is open to discussion, but my guy took care of him, and got charged with an insane number of crimes: kidnapping, attempted murder. When you read the paper, he was demonized. … What didn’t get mentioned was that the guy plinking in an idiotic place was a Three Percenter, in the Three Percent militia cult and had Three Percent painted on his car.”

Canney, an avid fisherman, hiker and backpacker, moved his solo criminal defense practice from Denver to the mountain town of Salida in 2018. He can trace the decision back to a 2010 visit for the Run Through Time Trail Marathon, where he watched brown trout rising under the F Street bridge, took in the panoramic view of the Sangre de Cristo, Collegiate Peaks and Sawatch Range, and wondered why the hell didn’t he live there.

Living in the most beautiful place on Earth is something he still thinks about when he’s walking to court or driving down scenic mountain highways—or when, after Labosky’s family helped get him out on bond, Canney, his investigator and Labosky headed for the Midland trail system in Canney’s old, beat-up Subaru Crosstrek. As the day went along, Canney grew ever stronger in his conviction that Labosky was “one of the most gentle, nice guys in the world.”

After Canney persuaded the jury to see Labosky the same way, they convicted him on only one charge: felony menacing. His sentence was probation.

It’s a highlight that comes to mind when Canney has time to stop and think about his busy caseload. In the last few months alone, he’s tried cases involving second-degree murder, identity theft, sexual assault, prohibited use of a weapon, and careless driving resulting in death. He says his cases, a mix of court-appointed Alternate Defense Counsel work and the “run-of-the-mill stuff that comes in” to his private practice—like DUIs, domestic violence and drug cases—are the ones that pick him more often than the other way around.

“Some people want this yelling aggressive lawyer,” he says. “Other people are scared to death and want to be heard and listened to. You want to make sure you’re the right fit, and that they’re not going to drive you crazy, too. I have a pretty high tolerance and sometimes have gotten appointed on cases where somebody has already run through a few lawyers.”

That “pretty high tolerance,” Canney’s friends and colleagues say, is a vast understatement characteristic of the self-deprecating lawyer.

“When defendants fire their lawyers and judges need to find someone to take on the most difficult cases, they’ll reach out to Randy, who somehow always finds time to accept the responsibility for dealing with those cases,” says Michael Axt, a Denver criminal defense attorney who owned the Denver building on High Street where Canney rented space as a solo practitioner for 25 years. “I don’t recall Randy ever turning down a request by a judge to take on a case. I don’t know how he has the energy to try the number of cases that he tries. He’s done some of the ugliest murder cases in Colorado, and I don’t know how he gets the results he does. There aren’t many that can.”

Those results most famously include a life sentence instead of the death penalty for convicted murderer Donta Page in 2001—the only case during Colorado’s 10 years of judicial death sentencing in which the three-judge panel voted unanimously for life. Denver defense attorney Jim Castle, who brought Canney onto the Page case as co-counsel, calls him a unicorn.

“Randy is literally a brilliant person,” Castle says, referring to Canney’s status as a nationally ranked chess master who won his first state championship when he was still in high school. “He can play against 40 people simultaneously and beat them all.”

When Castle asked for Canney’s help again on a more recent first-degree murder case—their client was ultimately acquitted—he noticed that Canney looked over the juror list during voir dire and instantly memorized all the information.

“He’s got a photographic memory,” Castle says. “You wouldn’t know it when you talk to him. He comes off as a really humble, nice guy, and yet he’s smarter than anybody else in the room.”

Axt, who confirms that Canney has never used a single note in voir dire, says he has an uncanny ability to disarm witnesses with his “country bumpkin” look and demeanor. After one trial, a juror asked Axt who dresses Canney in the morning, since his attire tends to look like it came from Goodwill.

“If it’s a lengthy trial and he’s got to buy another suit, which he’s loath to do, it’ll have the price tag on it,” Axt says. “He doesn’t care. He’s just so good at what he does. A lot of lawyers think by screaming and hollering you’re going to make points. That’s not how he practices law. His ability to get results without alienating people is truly a gift. Maybe it’s the same ability he has in playing chess. He just knows where to go from here and where to go from there and what the other side is going to do.”

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Canney remembers always wanting to be a criminal defense lawyer. He credits that to having known the late, great defense attorney Walter Gerash, through chess; and a college internship in which he got to sit in Colorado Springs courtrooms and watch the trials of Michael Warren, a public defender who, like Gerash, is a larger-than-life character.

Canney, by contrast, sees himself as a low-key criminal defense personality.

“I’m kind of boring, so my newest thing is to try to add color to my life,” he says of his bright orange Crosstrek and having recently painted his house purple. He and his wife Bonnie Simpson, who are notorious for rescuing animals (at one point, they had a bunch of dogs, several cats, cows and some chickens), are thinking about planting a lavender field to match the house.

Canney attended the University of Colorado Law School because it was “in the trout-fishing belt” and had in-state tuition. He was quickly disillusioned by what he felt were boring classes. Then
the school offered an extra opportunity to be part of its clinical program in which he could represent criminal defendants under the student practice code.

“That was just life-changing,” he says. “I’ll never forget getting my first real client.”

She was an older woman who’d been charged with resisting arrest; Canney thought the cop had overreached, twisting her arm.

“I’m sure she wasn’t faultless, but in those types of situations, I’ve always gravitated toward the side of the little guy,” he says. His client ended up taking a plea bargain with a short jail sentence. “I was just hooked at that point.”

He knew he wanted to work for the Colorado State Public Defender and applied for an internship at the Boulder office, which didn’t hire him—until he got a call that one of the other interns had dropped out. “I threw my old, tattered tweed coat on and ran down to their office, and by that afternoon I was arguing bond motions for inmates at the Boulder County Jail,” he says.

He knew he’d found his people when, later that year, he was sent to the public defender’s annual conference in Breckenridge, at which he’d arranged to sleep on someone’s couch for free and add on a fishing trip.

“I’m looking for the public defender’s conference, and I walk into this room and there’s all these well-attired, well-groomed people with pink Izods, and I’m like, ‘No man, this can’t be the right place.’ It was like an insurance conference. Then I go down a few more doors and there’s like bearded people with hiking boots and a more interesting mix of folks, just some true believers and interesting people,” he says. “The Colorado system is one of the best. I always find it upsetting when people call and say, ‘I’ve got to hire an attorney. I’ve got this damn public defender,’ and they don’t realize that they’re probably some of the most well-trained and dedicated people, who try the most cases.”

After passing the Bar, Canney began his career at the public defender’s office in Montrose, where Stephens Dooley taught him how to tap into the emotion of a case.

“I came from an analytical background—my dad was a geologist,” Canney says. “But the reality is when you’re trying to convince people of things, you really need them to feel that human aspect first. Storytelling is so much more important.”

Dooley would tell him he picked jurors based on the way their butts moved. “I think he was being somewhat facetious, but there’s a lot to that,” Canney says. “The defense tends to need people who are a little more easygoing, a little more forgiving, and maybe a little less uptight in their body language.”

Dooley also showed how to get things done in a small jurisdiction: “‘We’re nice,’ they said. ‘We act professionally and we work things out.’ It was a teaching moment for the rest of my life.”

As an intern in Boulder, Canney realized he’d been a bit over-aggressive. When he returned to try a case there later, the chief judge told him as much. “You used to be quite an asshole, didn’t you?” he said. Canney agreed and apologized.

After two years in Montrose, Canney moved to the Jefferson County office for three years, with bigger, more serious cases and a conservative DA’s office hardcore on heavy sentences. He left for private practice in 1993.

“They had demoted the head of the Golden office, a great, calm person who let people do their work, and we were having incredible success,” he says. “I had the sense it was top heavy, top-down stuff. I said ‘Screw it. I’m going to go work for myself.’ I think I’m anti-authoritarian. I didn’t even like the authority of an organization that’s anti-authoritarian, so I just thought going into private practice was going to make sense. Of course, you make that decision and then you’re up every night until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning thinking ‘What have I just done?’”

He found a used desk in a newspaper ad and got some buddies to help him move that and some Walmart bookshelves to a little office in Axt’s building at 1733 High Street.

Axt says no matter how busy Canney’s caseload, he was always available to help anyone who asked, be that other lawyers in the building, or Axt’s wife, who taught at a gifted school in the city. When she asked Canney if he would spend time with her students, he blocked off Thursday mornings to play simultaneous chess games with 25 students.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say I owe my career to him,” says defense lawyer Riley Selleck, who grew up on the same block as Canney in Lakewood, interned for him in college, worked for him again as a paralegal and investigator before law school, then was hired as a public defender on the strength of Canney’s recommendation.

Selleck, who now also practices in Salida, recalls one day during his stint as a paralegal when he got online to play chess as things were winding down for the evening. From a different part of the room, Canney started calling out moves for him and won the match easily without ever seeing the board. “It was stunning to me,” Selleck says. “Honestly, it’s amazing for someone to be so capable and to have done such good things with those capabilities. That’s what’s inspiring to me.”

As an intern, Selleck also witnessed how Canney and Castle prepared the death penalty mitigation for Donta Page in 2001. He recalls the volume of evidence and expert testimony on Page’s abusive childhood, the injuries he suffered, the lead paint chipping off the walls. “I think about that in my own cases,” he says, “about the intensity with which they approached that. God, I mean the amount of investigation they had to do.”

Canney says there was no doubt that Page committed a horrific crime. He raped and murdered a 24-year-old woman who walked in on him burglarizing her home after he’d been kicked out of a halfway house two doors down.

“He admitted to it,” Canney says. “There was DNA. But we started investigating his life. He grew up in inner-city Washington, D.C. There were a lot of emergency room visits, indicative of potential child abuse. We had some of the nation’s most well-thought-of brain scientists testify to the relationship between frontal lobe damage and murders that were spur-of-the-moment.”

Castle and Canney went to D.C. and met with Page’s family and teachers. “You basically do an archaeological review of someone’s life and get to know everything that happened to them since they were born,” Castle says. “Randy did an amazing job of that.”

“One of the things we do as defense attorneys is humanize our clients and explain their behavior and get them help,” Canney says. “You’re showing the DA and the judge this isn’t a bad person; it’s a good person with issues. And there really are innocent people, and there are bad cops and lazy cops as well as good cops.”

Canney also became involved with Coloradans Against the Death Penalty. He served as its president and likes to think he played some role in the punishment’s removal. In 2005, he received the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar’s Jonathan Olom Award “for remarkable personal sacrifice made without regard to personal gain in the defense of the accused.”

Those efforts extend to serving as an expert witness on ineffective assistance of counsel in postconviction cases.

“You have these—there’s no better way to say it—these bottom-feeder lawyers who prey on families of defendants who have public defenders and are complaining about them. They figure they’ll hire this attorney at a fee far too low to do the case properly, and then they screw it up royally and people get convicted,” he says. “There’s a few of these guys who have been routinely disciplined time after time and eventually gotten disbarred or suspended. The number of times I’ve testified against some of them is significant, but it’s rewarding because these are cases that weren’t done right. If somebody isn’t properly represented, there needs to be recourse. The number of exonerations in death penalty cases is just stunning.”

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Canney’s postconviction work often brings him back to Denver, which tends to reinforce his decision to move to Salida. The only thing that’s lacking there is the chess scene.

Canney grew up in the Bobby Fischer competitive chess boom of the 1960s, replaying every move on his own little chess set. He’s been playing competitively since he won his first tournament, the junior section of the Colorado open, in sixth grade, coming straight from football practice.

More than 20 years ago, around the time Canney turned 40 and his father passed away, he vowed to get in shape. “I ran a 5K, a 10K and a sprint triathlon,” he says. “I figured as long as I sign up for one of these things every month or two, I’ll never get out of shape again. And then it just sort of spiraled into crazy land.”

His goal now is to win the Colorado Senior Championship, the only tournament he’s yet to top in the state. Last year, he came in second to Brian Wall, whom he first played in 1974 at John Watson’s Chess House, a row home on Bannock where he says all the chess bums hung out. At the most recent tournament, they played to a draw, but Canney had drawn another game, so Wall took first place.

“It’s funny, I’m good at chess but don’t play it as much,” he says. “And I suck horribly at all these endurance athletic things, but I’ll pay money to go to Coeur d’Alene and do a triathlon.”

It helps him manage the stress of criminal defense, as does his wife’s advice about not taking things too personally. He thinks of the threats he received when representing Page, and how he recently heard a news story that Page was involved in starting a prison radio program. “There is redemption in people,” Canney says. “No matter how horrible the thing they do.”