Republicans have released a new television ad portraying Democratic congressional candidate Ed Perlmutter as soft on crime, but Perlmutter says he actually helped pass the sex offender notification law the commercial accuses him of killing.
Perlmutter called the ad “desperate and hypocritical” during a news conference Monday, where the Colorado State Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police appeared with him.
He said then-Sen. Dottie Wham, a Denver Republican who has endorsed Perlmutter, wanted the 1997 bill in question postponed because local law-enforcement agencies had expressed concern about local-control issues.
Perlmutter in the next session went on to help pass a more comprehensive bill, legislative records show.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which has spent $300,000 on the ad to bolster Perlmutter’s 7th Congressional District opponent, Rick O’Donnell, stood by the television spot.
“Look, his soft-on-crime record goes far beyond this example we cited in this ad,” said NRCC spokesman Jonathan Collegio, pointing to spots run by one of Perlmutter’s primary opponents, Peggy Lamm.
O’Donnell in the past few weeks has seized on many of the same crime issues Lamm did in the primary, including his 1996 vote against legislation that would have allowed child sexual assault victims to testify by closed-circuit television.
O’Donnell also pointed to Perlmutter’s vote against requiring background checks for prospective school employees in 1999, his voting against a bill to remove a 10-year statute of limitation for sex crimes when DNA evidence can solve the crime and supporting a measure to give drug addicts clean needles.
The NRCC commercial, unveiled this weekend, states that Perlmutter in 1997 “killed” House Bill 1257, which would have strengthened provisions for notifying a community when a sex offender moves to an area.
Perlmutter said O’Donnell was being hypocritical because O’Donnell wrote essays in 1996 for the Washington, D.C., -based Republican think tank the Progress & Freedom Foundation opposing the federal Communications Decency Act. That federal law, eventually deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, made it unlawful to make “indecent” material available to minors over the Internet.
O’Donnell was opposed to the legislation because it was “overly broad,” said O’Donnell’s spokesman, Jona than Tee.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
