Lawyer pleads guilty in Bentley crash; was trial exhaustion to blame?
A St. Louis criminal defense lawyer has pleaded guilty to lesser charges in an April car crash he had blamed on exhaustion from a trial that had ended just hours before.
Lawyer Scott Rosenblum pleaded guilty Monday to careless and imprudent driving resulting in an accident and improper lane usage, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. A prior story by the Post-Dispatch describes Rosenblum as “one of the area’s best-known lawyers.”
Police in Brentwood, Missouri, said Rosenblum’s Bentley had crossed the center line and crashed head-on with a Toyota Tundra pickup on April 29. The truck driver was treated for minor injuries at the hospital. Rosenblum was initially charged with driving while intoxicated.
Rosenblum told the Post-Dispatch after his arrest that he was tired, not intoxicated, because he had worked long hours gaining an acquittal during his client’s weeklong trial on a molestation charge.
Rosenblum said he had dinner with his family at the conclusion of the trial then went back to the office to prepare for another case. The accident occurred on his drive home. “All I can say is that I was totally, physically and emotionally exhausted after putting in 15- to 16-hour workdays for a week,” Rosenblum told the newspaper in the earlier story. “I made a mistake driving that tired.”
Rosenblum will have to complete 100 hours of community service, serve two years of probation, complete a substance abuse traffic offender program, and refrain from drinking liquor within eight hours of driving a vehicle. A decision on whether he will lose his driver’s license is pending.
