With a degree from Dartmouth in hand, George Ostler could have headed down any number of career paths upon his graduation in 1977.
Instead he moved back home with his parents, George and Annelies, in Hartford. When he wasn’t traveling, Ostler made a living cutting firewood, working for a local livestock butcher and helping out on his family’s Jericho Road farm.
A career in “rural trades,” as Ostler described it, wasn’t what his parents, who emigrated from Germany in 1957, had in mind for their oldest son. “They thought I really should do more,” Ostler said.
To get them “off my back,” Ostler joked, he applied to Vermont Law School in nearby South Royalton.
Still in its infancy, the school was building a reputation for its environmental program, but Ostler said he was “drawn to criminal law.” Making sure that people the government accuses of crimes receive fair treatment — starting with the fundamental principle of innocent until proven guilty — suited Ostler well.
“I’m not generally an establishment person,” he told me over coffee this week.
I gathered it was a trait that he picked from his mother who is still fighting the good fight at age 93. While participating in an Upper Valley demonstration against the Trump administration and its agenda this spring, Annelies Ostler told the Valley News that having grown up in Nazi Germany she had already “lived through a good example of dictatorship” and didn’t care to experience another.
Her son, however, remains optimistic that the rule of law will survive Trump and his loyalists’ authoritarian playbook.
“As long as we still have juries, there is still hope,” Ostler said. “I lost a lot of jury trials during my career, but the system works. People who serve on juries really try hard to do the right thing.”
After graduating from law school in 1983, Ostler embarked on a 40-year legal career that ended with his retirement earlier this year at age 69. For decades, Ostler was the go-to attorney in the Upper Valley for anyone who ran afoul of the law from shoplifting to murder. (The Norwich firm is now led by Cabot Teachout who seems to be picking up where his mentor left off as the Upper Valley’s criminal defense attorney of choice.)
Ostler wasn’t flamboyant or publicity hungry. He methodically went about business without antagonizing cops, prosecutors, or more importantly, judges and juries.
“George was a quiet assassin. He didn’t jump up and down and scream. He was very even-keeled,” said Marc Hathway, who during his 38 years as Sullivan County’s elected prosecutor was a regular courtroom adversary. “He was unfailingly professional and very smart at putting together a defense.”
Whenever paperwork for a new case showed that Ostler was representing the defendant, Hathaway said his reaction was automatically, “Oh, I’d better bring my ‘A’ game for this one.”
Hathaway, who retired as county attorney last year, said Ostler “could have the short end of the facts and still work up a defense. He knew how to spot weaknesses in a (prosecutor’s) case.”
Ostler spent his first 11 years after law school as a New Hampshire public defender before joining a private practice in Norwich. Over a span of more than four decades, he tried thousands of bench trials and about 125 jury trials at both the state and federal levels.
I recall a case about 10 years ago involving an Upper Valley woman charged with DUI shortly after she left a nightclub in West Lebanon. Police claimed she was initially stopped for running a red light. Ostler had his doubts. He brought in a private investigator to reconstruct the scene of the traffic stop. From where his cruiser was located, the officer couldn’t have seen the light change colors, Ostler argued in pre-trial filings.
The judge ruled the traffic stop, the basis for the DUI charge, was unreasonable. Case closed.
Ostler was an early advocate for police departments outfitting cruisers with dashboard video equipment and requiring officers to wear body cameras. “If you want a criminal justice system that’s fair and accurate, there’s been no bigger improvement than cameras,” Ostler said.
Although it meant less business for him (Dartmouth students were steady clients), Ostler was a strong proponent of court diversion programs long before Hanover police and its in-house prosecutor came to recognize that dragging young people through the criminal justice system for low-level offenses, such as underage drinking, was bad policy.
Ostler was also at the forefront of the legal community’s campaign to reform marijuana laws, which like underage drinking, were strictly enforced by Hanover police. “Fortunately, those days are over,” he said.
New Hampshire decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2017 and Hanover cops (thanks to a change in leadership a few years before that) adopted less aggressive strategies on policing the Dartmouth campus. (Except when it comes to pro-Palestinian protesters.)
Ostler, who lives in Sharon with his wife, Paula Duprat, a retired teacher, isn’t leaving the legal world entirely behind. Starting in January, he’ll co-teach an advanced trial seminar at his alma mater, now called Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he told me. “It’s a way to do some mentoring and stay in the game.”
His students are sure to learn a lot, and their future clients will benefit from it.
