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Littwin: Trailhead on slippery path with Ritter ad

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 23, 2006 at midnight

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The ad is powerful. Let's agree on that.

A mother lost a 4-year-old child to a hit-and-run driver six years ago.

A mother blames Bill Ritter for a plea-bargained sentence she thinks is too light.

A grieving mother says Ritter, who was then the Denver district attorney, cared more about criminals than he did about the victims.

The ad is powerful. It's also at least borderline exploitative, and remarkably, in a case so sad and so tragic, it's also disingenuous. And sloppily so.

Trailhead Group - using the name Coloradans for Justice, presumably because the Trailhead name is leaking credibility by the hour - is running the ad.

In it, the announcer intones that the hit-and-run driver served eight months for the crime. Followed by script that says "after sentencing."

You would think then that the hit-and-run driver served, well, eight months - particularly after the mother says it was a slap on the wrist.

It turns out, she served 15 months of a two-year sentence. It turns out she then spent three years in residential treatment.

Maybe that's not enough. If it were my child, I don't know how there could be enough.

Maybe there were complications, and that's all the DA's office could get. You can't tell from the ad.

Certainly, there are some tough questions here. But there's an easy question, too:

Why would anyone possibly cheapen a story that's so heartbreaking on its own merits by intentionally fudging the facts of the case - unless, of course, you couldn't care less about the case?

Or maybe you think the folks at Trailhead are suddenly outraged by this injustice. I didn't see Bruce Benson picketing City Hall at the time. Outraged or not, I do know they must be flummoxed by the math.

Of course, there's injustice and then there's an attempt at Willie Horton-ing your opponent.

Obviously, the reason for the ad is to reinforce the concept that Bill Ritter is somehow soft on crime and that because he plea-bargained 97 percent of his cases - the national plea bargain rate is 95 percent - that he really couldn't be bothered to prosecute criminals.

That's the subtext here - that Ritter just didn't care enough to go after the driver. A little girl was killed by a woman who left the scene - and Ritter was left unmoved.

It's absurd, of course, as everyone knows who watches Law & Order. You don't become a district attorney because you like criminals. We all know how the system works and how, without plea bargains, it wouldn't work.

Even the people at Trailhead know. If they didn't, major Trailhead funder Pete Coors presumably wouldn't have plea-bargained his recent DUI case.

And Republican Attorney General John Suthers, whom we can assume Trailhead is supporting for re-election, wouldn't have praised Ritter's record as DA - or admitted that he plea-bargained something like 95 percent of his cases himself.

And the citizens of Denver, many of whom may not be pro-crime, wouldn't have kept re-electing Ritter.

There are reasons to wonder whether Ritter is qualified to be governor. You could begin with his relative lack of experience. Does being a Denver district attorney really prepare you for the job?

Does growing up on a farm? Or going to Africa as a missionary?

But Bob Beauprez isn't going after Ritter for being an inexperienced outsider because, well, Beauprez wants to paint himself as a nonpolitician politician - an outsider businessman who wants to apply business practices to government.

And so, he goes, instead, after a district attorney's record that, over 12 years, is bound to reveal some ugly cases.

Meanwhile, the campaign gets ugly, too. You knew it would. There was the Rocky/CBS 4 poll that showed Ritter leading by 17 points and now a Rasmussen poll that puts it at 16.

You're down double figures in September and you attack. Beauprez was able to attack ex-District Attorney Dave Thomas' record in his last Congressional race - and it worked.

This is a different situation. Ritter has already put out an ad in response to the Trailhead ad, placing the blame for it squarely on Beauprez.

The Beauprez campaign, meantime, calls the Ritter response ad "sleazy" for pinning Beauprez to an ad that he basically endorses. Why the outrage?

Last week, the Beauprez campaign promised to reveal Ritter cold cases - cases that Beauprez had told the Rocky editorial board were "disgusting." The campaign even had a cool graphic ready. But, somehow, the cases never showed up. Beauprez came out instead with his positive, I'm Bob Beauprez, stuck-in-this-barn series of ads.

And now, Trailhead comes out with the attack.

Coincidence? Coordination?

I wouldn't presume to guess. I'll just say they're all innocent until proven ready to plea-bargain.