A U.S. Supreme Court decision last week placed a Llano man in the history books, or at least into the annals of law.

In an 8-to-1 decision justices of the Supreme Court ruled that Walter Rothgery should have had access to legal counsel immediately when he was arrested in Gillespie County in 2002.

Rothgery turns out to be just the kind of man among us for whom that kind of protection is most important. He was arrested as a felon in possession of a firearm because of an erroneous California police report that popped up on his background check. Unable to afford a lawyer to straighten out the mess, he saw his whole life unravel.

Only a handful of states have continued to say that Sixth Amendment rights to counsel do not come into play until after a person has been indicted for a crime and in Texas that will now change. People who appear before a magistrate immediately will have the right to have an attorney appointed.

Rothgery is a Cincinnati, Ohio native who had attended West Point in his youth. He says nothing except the patience required in his former career as a computer software systems engineer prepared for what happened.

He and his wife had come to Fredericksburg from Arizona to manage an RV park and had not even sent for their possessions when they saw the job fall through. Then he was arrested. The couple spent their last dime on bail when Rothgery was arrested and neither oral nor written requests for a lawyer were granted.

Without representation, Rothgery was indicted and spent three weeks in jail before charges were dismissed. The man had lost his job and any real prospects in a town where he had been a suspected felon.

“Walt called a statewide legal help line when he was still dealing with a lot of the fallout, the economic aftereffects of being unemployed,” said Andrea Marsh, now Executive Director of the Texas Fair Defense Project. “He was referred to me when I was still working at the Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.”

Marsh had taken time out after college and was just a couple of years out of law school when she met Rothgery in 2004.

The meeting was auspicious because she persevered to carry the case to the high court. The path toward Rothgery’s civil rights decision took them through the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as he sought a remedy for the loss of earnings and expenses he suffered in seven months without an attorney.

For now, Rothgery works at a rental supply in Llano. He says his wife is recovering from ill health and draws him occasionally to projects for which she volunteers in a local church.

“The people in Llano have been great,” he said. “We’re part of the community now.”