December 10, 2010 09:03 PM UTC

Damn You Hal Haddon! Damn Yooouuu!!!

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote last month about a case involving Fifth District Attorney Mark Hurlbert (and one-time GOP State Senate candidate) and a hit-and-run charge involving a bicyclist. The alleged driver of the vehicle, Martin Joel Erzinger, is a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney wealth manager who miraculously avoided felony charges seemingly because he handles a billion dollars in Morgan Stanley investments (Hulbert actually admitted this).

We thought we should update you on this case, in part because it means we can link to Velo News, The Journal of Competitive Cycling, which we’ve never done before. Here’s the latest from Velo News:

Hurlbert has proposed that Erzinger should plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges – careless driving and failure to notify police of an accident – in exchange for the dropping of the felony charge.

[Steven] Milo [the bicycle rider], an anesthesiologist who works as part of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s liver transplant team in New York, has objected to the deal. His attorney, Harold Haddon, has filed an objection to the proposed plea bargain, citing Colorado Revised Statutes § 24-4.1-301, that state’s law drafted to assure “the rights of victims and witnesses to crimes.”…

…All three sides in this case – the prosecution, the defense and the victim – are slated to appear at a hearing schedule in District Court in Eagle, Colorado, on Thursday, December 16 at 2:00 p.m.

It will be at that hearing that the judge will have the opportunity to hear arguments and testimony from all sides in the case. It is my understanding that Dr. Milo will make the trip from New York to testify. Erzinger, the defendant, will be there and, of course, so will the County Attorney who proposed the deal.

The irony here is too delicious to ignore. The attorney for the bicyclist is Harold “Hal” Haddon, the same Hal Haddon who was hired by Kobe Bryant to defend the basketball star after he was accused of rape in 2003. Hulbert, of course, was the District Attorney in the Kobe Bryant case as well — and we all know how that turned out.