Original Article Inmate dies before 3rd appeal ends Michael Kiefer The Arizona Republic May. 1, 2006 12:00 AM Richard Rossi spent more than 20 years on Arizona's death row for shooting a man to death over the price of a used typewriter. Twice he got the appeals courts to throw out his death sentences. And he hoped for a third successful appeal because of a sentencing judge who himself was convicted of possession of marijuana. Rossi wrote a book about his time on death row, called Waiting to Die, which was published in 2004. But in the end, after two decades of fighting to stay alive, he died anyway, apparently of natural causes, in the medical center of the Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence on April 22. He was 58. Rossi was a bespectacled, unassuming-looking man. "He was really a bright, intelligent human being," said Bob Storrs, a Phoenix defense attorney who represented him on two of his appeals. Dale Baich, a federal public defense attorney who represented Rossi in federal court for his most recent appeal, called him "kind and generous, so different from the man who committed that awful crime." Even the family of his victim came to forgive him. "Over the years, I let go of it, and let God (handle it), because I'm not God," said the victim's son, Eric August. Otherwise, August said, "I would have been as sick as Richard Rossi was." In 1983, Rossi was a Phoenix accountant with a $1,000-a-week drug habit. According to court records, when he injected or free-based cocaine, he would become a delusional and paranoid monster who once shot his refrigerator. And in one of those drug-crazed frenzies, on Aug. 29, 1983, he saw a newspaper ad and took a used typewriter to the Scottsdale home of Harold August to sell for drug money. August, 68, a former college instructor, liked to work on typewriters. But the two quarreled over the deal, and Rossi flew into a rage, robbed August and shot him in the hand and the chest. Then, according to newspaper accounts, August, a World War II veteran, said to Rossi, "You have my money, you shot me, what else do you want?" Rossi answered by shooting August in the mouth, killing him. Rossi was sentenced to death for the murder, but twice, the state Supreme Court reversed the sentence. In 1988, he was sentenced to death a third time by Judge Philip Marquardt of Maricopa County Superior Court. A month later, Marquardt was arrested trying to smuggle marijuana into Texas from Mexico, and in 1991 he was convicted of possession and forced to resign. That conviction was the basis for Rossi's latest appeal. Last December, Dale Baich argued to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that Marquardt may have been under the influence of marijuana during Rossi's trial.