Ritter camp to group's accusation: nonsense

Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 24, 2006 at midnight

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A Republican group accused Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter Wednesday of allowing thousands of felons "to walk" while he was Denver district attorney.

Ritter fired back that the Trailhead Group was twisting the truth about his "rock solid" record during 12 years as DA.

"We were tough on crime," Ritter said in a statement. "We put more people in prison than any other DA - including Republican DA's. And we protected the public."

Trailhead Executive Director Alan Philp said Ritter's own statistics show that his office accepted 61,498 felony cases and sent 12,006 felons to prison. Philp is demanding to know what happened to the remaining 49,492 felony cases - where suspects "were acquitted or plea-bargained, but didn't serve prison time."

"Bill Ritter as district attorney let Colorado and Denver down," Philp said. "We can debate statistics for hours, but the bottom line remains the same. There were far too many cases where bad people were let off easy or let off free. "

Nonsense, Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer replied.

"Bill's record is very, very clear. He extracted a guilty plea from 95 percent of the people his office filed charges against," Dreyer said, referring to all felony and misdemeanor cases filed. "That's higher than the 85 percent state average."

Both sides agree that Ritter sent more than 12,000 felons to prison during his tenure as DA from 1993 to 2005 but differ on the number and disposition of cases Ritter's office accepted from police.

Dreyer questions the accuracy of the number of felony cases Trailhead says the DA accepted. He said thousands of cases presented by police weren't accepted if prosecutors found insufficient evidence. And not all cases accepted by the DA were prosecuted because of evidentiary and other problems.

As for Trailhead's contention that Ritter accepted nearly 50,000 felony cases that resulted in no prison time, Dreyer said less serious offenders were sentenced to county jail, community corrections and probation.

Ritter has argued that locking up every criminal charged would overwhelm limited prison and jail space, which must be reserved for dangerous criminals. If Republican critics want to send every felon to prison, Ritter counters, they should explain how they'll pay for a massive prison building program.

Philp stuck by his figures and by a Trailhead press release that claimed Ritter said in a 1998 Rocky Mountain News article, "A guy's got to work at getting jail time in Denver. He's got to do something very bad, or keep doing something fairly bad over and over again."

The comment was actually an editorial page columnist paraphrasing Ritter's warning that Denver's overcrowded jails were making it hard for him to lock up bad guys. Ritter and a judge quoted in the column spoke against a consultant's report recommending that jail space could be freed up by diverting criminals to alternatives like electronic monitoring at home.

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