Courts swayed stolen laptop case

Deputy DA cited request in decision not to prosecute

Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 8, 2007 at midnight

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Three days before the story broke that a former Denver judge had been caught in possession of a stolen state laptop computer, a top Colorado judicial department official asked Denver police to drop the case.

Carol Haller, legal counsel for the state court administrator's office, says in a written statement to Denver police that she had reviewed police reports and discussed the issue with State Court Administrator Gerald Marroney and asked "that no prosecution take place at this time."

Citing that request, a deputy Denver district attorney the next day officially declined to file charges against former Judge Larry Manzanares, who was then Denver's city attorney.

She was quickly overruled by top DA brass, who on the same day decided to turn the case over to a special prosecutor because of the conflict of interest with the Denver DA's office.

The Jefferson County district attorney is now handling the case and will decide whether Manzanares will be charged.

Haller and Marroney were unavailable Wednesday to make clear whether the reports they reviewed and discussed identified Manzanares, a former employee of their department, as the suspect.

A spokesman for the agency could not say.

"I think that it would be likely" that the state judicial branch knew when it reviewed the police reports that the subject was former Judge Larry Manzanares, Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney's office said.

Kimbrough said that ordinarily, if a theft victim doesn't want to prosecute, that could be enough to derail the case.

"If it had been a routine theft of property in which the property had been returned and the victim did not want to cooperate with the prosecution, we might honor the victim's request," she said. "But it was a mistake, because it was not routine."

Rob McCallum, public information officer for the state court administrator, said that officials with his agency wanted to examine the computer before taking a position on prosecution.

"Now before we made any decision one way or the other, we wanted to be able to look at the computer and understand what may have been done," McCallum said.

"We had just received the computer back. We didn't even know what it was we were being asked to make a decision on."

He said the the state wanted to review the contents of the computer before making any decisions.

"We needed to have time to do the diligence to find out what had happened to the machine before we could make an assertion as to whether or not something happened," he said.

On-again, off-again laptop prosecution

• Jan. 26: State court administrator worker reports $1,579 laptop computer missing from Denver City and County Building.

• Jan. 31: Theft detection software installed in the missing laptop sends notification to an electronic monitoring center that the computer is logged on to the Internet, recording the Internet Protocol (IP) address.

• Feb. 7: Denver County Court Judge Melvin Okamoto issues a search warrant allowing a Denver police detective access to Comcast records that identify the subscriber through the IP address.

• Feb. 20: Carol Haller, legal counsel for the state court administrator's office, asks Denver police not to prosecute anyone in the laptop theft.

• Feb. 21: A deputy DA initially decides she can drop the case because of Haller's request, but the prosecutor's superiors reverse the decision after learning that Denver City Attorney Larry Manzanares, a former judge, is the suspect.

• Feb. 23: Mayor John Hickenlooper puts Manzanares on leave after being contacted by a Denver's 7 reporter. The station breaks the story about Manzanares having the stolen laptop in his possession that night.

• Feb. 27: Manzanares resigns, saying the investigation had become an "untenable distraction."

kilzerl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2644

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