Many Agree: Ritter Wasn T Soft As DA

Many agree: Ritter wasn’t soft as DA Even former foes say that attempts to discredit his record are off the mark

Sue Lindsay, Rocky Mountain News. Oct 12, 2006. pg. 14.A

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez has come out swinging in recent debates with Democrat Bill Ritter, going straight at his opponent's record as Denver district attorney. Hammering Ritter for his approval of plea bargains that allegedly kept immigrant criminals from being deported, Beauprez's jaw tightened. "Why," he wondered, looking into the TV camera during a debate last week, "should the people of Colorado trust you to exercise good judgment on things like economic development and education and health care?" The point of the Beauprez attack is based on a documented public concern. In a Rocky Mountain News/CBS 4 poll in September, 20 percent of Coloradans rated illegal immigration as the most important issue in their vote for governor. Beauprez also has seized on plea bargains as a way to combat what is perceived to be a key Ritter strength - his lengthy and, by most accounts, highly reputable tenure as Denver DA. Ritter counterpunched in one debate with a barb about Beauprez's "cocktail party" knowledge of the law. But the Republican line of attack has touched off a buzz in the legal community, with both campaigns - or like- minded independent 527 committees - pulling old case files for fodder. Ritter oversaw some controversial cases during his 12 years as Denver DA. But opposing defense attorneys and Republican prosecutors alike say that Beauprez's attempts to discredit Ritter's record are off the mark. Even Republican Attorney General John Suthers, who supports Beauprez for governor, weighed in on the issue when the plea bargain issue first arose, telling the Longmont Daily Times-Call, he didn't think Beauprez would "get much mileage" attacking Ritter's record as DA and should look elsewhere for campaign issues. "For a big-city prosecutor, I think Bill Ritter did a good job," Suthers said. Outgoing Colorado Public Defender David Kaplan was more animated. "I'm not a big fan of most elected district attorneys, so I've had plenty of problems with Bill Ritter in the past, but this attack on him is ridiculous and outrageous," he said. "This is someone criticizing the justice system who has never been involved in it or doesn't understand the justice system." Kaplan said he butted heads with Ritter for years. "We are on opposing sides in the courthouse and we have always had very different opinions about the death penalty and other sentencing issues, but he is a man of high moral character, he is honest and I think he's compassionate." Kaplan said Ritter "set the tone and policy but had confidence in letting prosecutors exercise discretion in the interest of justice." Ritter stands by his record. "We put over 12,000 people in prison," he said. "We saw the most dramatic decrease in violent crime from 1993 to 2000 that the city ever had, down to numbers not seen since the 1960s. "I'm proud of my record and proud of the work of the people in that office with me." Ritter was still new in office during the so-called summer of violence in 1993. He cracked down on gangs, using racketeering laws to indict gang leaders and their henchmen. Ritter also strengthened units in his office handling crimes against children and domestic violence cases. A second grand jury was needed to handle an increase in economic crime cases brought by his office. "We went from one case the year before I took over to 42 cases indicted the last year I was DA," Ritter said. Plea bargain percentages Beauprez has criticized Ritter for reaching plea bargains in 97 percent of cases. But the national average for district attorneys is 95 percent and Suthers' plea bargain rate when he served as district attorney for El Paso County was 98 percent. "The bottom line is every prosecutor plea bargains the vast majority of the cases he handles," said Craig Silverman, a former Denver prosecutor who criticized Ritter when he ran against him for district attorney in 1996, but has endorsed him for governor. Plea bargains are essential unless voters want to pay billions of dollars to fund a criminal justice system that would allow for trials, said Tom Hammond, president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar. "The criminal justice system would crash without plea bargains," he said. "If there were no plea bargains, only the most serious cases would be filed, which would create a huge gap in the criminal justice system, something no one really wants." Beauprez has vigorously attacked Ritter's use of the charge of trespassing on agricultural land in plea bargains with illegal immigrants. In response, Ritter said Beauprez has singled out a relative handful of cases (151) in the more than 200,000 total cases he handled as district attorney. "That didn't change the deportation status of an illegal immigrant," he said. "No matter what they pleaded guilty to, they were deportable and should be deported." Ritter acknowledged that some defendants with immigration holds were released back -into the community because federal immigration officials didn't pick them up. In any event, excavating old files to find examples of cases that could have been handled differently isn't a true assessment of Ritter's overall performance, prosecutors and defense lawyers say. "There is not a single district attorney whose office could withstand a fine-tooth-comb inspection and not come up with a few mistakes," said Bob Grant, former Adams County district attorney and a Ritter supporter. Grant said district attorneys must entrust cases to their deputies, and most deputy district attorneys have caseloads of more than 200 cases, making it "difficult to handle every case with the utmost of attention. You can't do it. The goal is to seek justice for everyone. In my view he (Ritter) did it better than most." Speaking from his years of experience as a public defender and defense attorney, Hammond said, "The suggestion that Bill Ritter is soft on crime is untrue and unfair. I tried several cases because I couldn't get the resolution I wanted. That was because Ritter's deputy DAs drove hard bargains. "Bill Ritter was never known as a liberal prosecutor," Hammond said. "In fact, he had a very conservative reputation as a deputy DA, as a federal prosecutor and as the Denver district attorney. If someone got a break, it was because of the facts, not the man, and not his office." No death sentences Although Beauprez has contended that Ritter failed to seek the death penalty for capital crimes, Ritter sought execution for defendants in seven cases. None of them resulted in death sentences, for a variety of reasons, including failures by juries or three-judge panels to agree on a death sentence. "My commitment was to seek the death penalty in cases where I reasonably believed we could get it," Ritter said. "We sought it seven times and didn't get it." Ritter has said that death penalty cases require great expenditures of money and time, are rarely imposed, and result in lengthy and more costly appeals when they are imposed. Silverman agrees. "If you want a case that never dies, get a death penalty case," he said. Silverman won a death sentence in 1986 for murderer Frank Rodriguez, and then watched as the case languished in appeals that lasted 16 years. Rodriguez died in prison in 2002 before he could be executed. "I was still working on the case," Silverman said. Ritter came under fire for not seeking the death penalty in two controversial cases involving the 1993 murder of Tom Hollar and a triple homicide at the Temptations night club in 1992. Hollar was gunned down July 23, 1993, while he and his wife were parking their car near their Capitol Hill apartment. His wife was abducted and beaten. Shane Davis and Steven Harrington were convicted of first- degree murder and sentenced to life plus 208 years in prison. Michael Quezada, a California gang member, was convicted of first- degree murder and sentenced to three consecutive life terms in the slayings of Kenny Knox, 29, Donald Scott, 25, and Ennis Evans, 24. In both cases, Ritter said he consulted with attorneys in his office and the consensus was that the death penalty was unlikely to be imposed. One key problem with seeking the death penalty in the Hollar case was that prosecutors didn't know who fired the shots that killed Hollar, said Silverman, who prosecuted the case. Also, he said, they wanted to try the two defendants together to spare Hollar's widow a second trial and to keep the two defendants from blaming the murder on each other. Only Harrington would have been a candidate for the death penalty because of his longer criminal record, Silverman said, making a trial of the two together impossible if the death penalty were sought. Ritter said he couldn't seek the death penalty against Quezada because of a lack of aggravating factors. The death of multiple victims wasn't an aggravator until Ritter lobbied to change the law because of the Quezada case. Although Quezada had killed someone in Los Angeles before the Denver murders, he hadn't gone to trial, so the California case couldn't be used against him as an aggravating factor. Grant, who had a reputation as a vocal supporter of the death penalty, said he admired the thoughtful way Ritter sought the death penalty "when I knew personally he was not a fan of it. In those cases where it was appropriate, he let the dogs out." Thwarted in Thill case In one of the most high-profile cases of his career, Ritter sought the death penalty against neo-Nazi skinhead Nathan Thill in the hate- crime slaying of African immigrant Oumar Dia, while Dia was waiting for a bus Nov. 18, 1997. A bystander, Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, also was shot and paralyzed. But the jury was deadlocked 10-2 on the first-degree murder charge because of evidence that Thill suffered severe childhood abuse and mental illness. Rather than risk another mistrial on the murder charge, Ritter's office let Thill plead guilty to first- degree murder with a mandatory life prison sentence without parole. Thill's co-defendant, Jeremiah Barnum, previously had been convicted of first-degree murder, but the conviction was overturned, in part because VanVelkinburgh screamed profanities at defense attorneys during her testimony in Barnum's trial. By the time the case wound its way through the appeals courts, nearly five years had passed and VanVelkinburgh's health had deteriorated to the point where she was nearly bedridden. The appeals courts also barred use of Thill's videotaped statement at a new trial. In light of those factors, Ritter's office reached a controversial plea agreement with Barnum in which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to an accessory to murder charge. "Barnum was not the shooter," Ritter said. "The shooter was serving life. We had lost our evidence and Jeannie's state was very fragile." During a break in taking her taped deposition for the Thill trial in 1999, "I saw her writhing in a kind of pain I have never or seldom -ever seen in my life," Ritter said. By 2002, her condition had deteriorated drastically. Ritter conceded that "we were bartering from a position of weakness" in negotiating Barnum's guilty plea. "I really believed her state was so fragile, and because we had lost key evidence, that the responsible thing to do was to plead to an accessory charge. I was doing what I felt I had to do to try to save her life. It turned out I wasn't wrong about that. Not too long after that, she committed suicide. I would make the same decision today." Barnum pleaded guilty in May 2002 and was sentenced July 17, 2002. VanVelkinburgh did not attend the hearing and died July 22, 2002. Outrage over cop shootings Although Beauprez has not made it a campaign issue, Ritter came under heavy criticism during his tenure in office for not filing charges in any police shooting case. "A prosecutor has an ethical duty to go forward only on cases that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt," Ritter said. "I did not have a case where I reasonably believed that I could convict an officer in a trial. It might have been politically helpful (to file charges), but it was not the right thing to do." Ritter continued a practice begun by his predecessor, Norm Early, of opening investigative files on police shootings to the public. Ritter said he was DA when a case, indicted by a grand jury under Early, went to trial. "The jury acquitted in 30 minutes," he said. But Ritter's decision not to charge officers involved in at least two fatal shootings - and the manner in which the police department disciplined the officers - led to public outrage and reforms, including the appointment of a civilian monitor to oversee internal police investigations. In a 2004 case, officer Ranjan Ford shot 63-year-old Frank Lobato as he lay in his bed with a pop can that Ford mistook for a gun. Ritter put the case in the hands of a grand jury, but after it deadlocked, Ritter decided not to file charges. A grand jury requires a lesser burden of proof than a trial jury would, Ritter said, in explaining that he did not believe he could win a conviction and so could not file criminal charges. In another controversial case, mentally disabled teenager Paul Childs was shot in 2003 by officer Paul Turney after police were called to the home and Childs came at them with a knife. Ritter called the case a "terrible tragedy" but said he did not believe he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt "that it was unreasonable for Turney to perceive that Childs was an imminent deadly threat to him or the other officers at the instant he fired." Silverman said he can't criticize Ritter's handling of those cases because he doesn't know the details of the investigations. "But I do know this," he said, "It's very difficult to convict a police officer for an act committed while he was out there trying to protect the public." Willing to make tough call Kaplan said Ritter's decisions as DA weren't driven by political expediency. "He's a man who's willing to make a difficult call that may not be politically beneficial to him, if he believes it is the right decision. We see less and less of that with our elected officials." Kaplan cites Ritter's support of the drug court, as an example. "He took positions that were not endearing him to the Denver District Court bench because he thought it was the right thing to do," Kaplan said. "He will do those kinds of things. He went to the mat to keep drug court alive when the district court judges wanted to kill it." Silverman was among Ritter's critics for supporting drug court and other "social programs" he wanted prosecutors to be involved in. "Bill always had a heavy emphasis on social services as a means to stop crime before it occurs," Silverman said. "That is a very worthy goal, but I felt prosecutors had enough to do." Politics aside, Silverman said nit-picking individual plea bargains is not an appropriate way to judge Ritter's tenure. "Bill had to expect to be attacked on his record as district attorney, but it's like criticizing John Elway for throwing an interception. If you throw enough passes, it's going to happen. You have to judge him on the entirety of his record rather than some individual misstep."