DENVER—At least 16 witnesses to crimes have been killed in Colorado since the creation of a fund to help protect people like them.
An investigation by The Denver Post has found that the 12-year-old program isn’t very organized and that many witnesses and even some members of law enforcement don’t know that it’s available.
An analysis of records since 1998 shows that prosecutors have filed more than 2,000 felony cases involving crimes against witnesses—from harassment to arson and murder. Some witnesses have decided on their own to move, buy handguns or alarm systems to protect themselves and their families.
Javad Marshall-Fields, 23, and his fiancee Vivian Wolfe, 22, were gunned down in June 2005 just days before he was set to testify in a murder trial of an accused drug dealer linked to a Chicago-based gang. After his funeral, Javad’s mother, Rhonda Fields, said she asked a prosecutor why her son never got protection and she said she was told that he never asked for it.
Prosecutors had asked to keep his address and the addresses of five other witnesses secret, but a judge didn’t act on the motion until six months later.
“That borders on gross negligence,” said Rhonda Fields, who didn’t know of the motion at the time.
When the judge did take up the motion, Jennifer Lundin, who had taken over from another prosecutor, said she didn’t realize the motion previously had been filed and believed the information had already been handed over to the defense lawyers. Lundin said recently she should have doublechecked the records.
Only a handful of states have comprehensive witness protection programs and most do nothing to protect witnesses. Colorado’s program has a $50,000 a year budget—cut from $100,000 this year by state lawmakers—which can be used to buy witnesses bus tickets or help them move to a new apartment.
But in the four years before Marshall-Fields and Wolfe were killed, the state spent an average of $29,895 a year protecting witnesses statewide, less than the amount Denver spends to plant flowers.
The program was set up in 1995 after three people were tortured and shot to stop waiter Frank Magnuson from testifying in a restaurant robbery case. Magnuson and another man died.
Gov. Bill Ritter, the former Denver district attorney, said he would ask for more money if the fund runs low and said he would welcome help from the federal government to states trying to protect witnesses.
“Any death is too many,” he said. “It undermines the very core of the system.”
In 2006, state legislators passed a law requiring the state to come up with a model to assess which witnesses are at risk and likely need protection—a measure backed by Rhonda Fields and Christine Wolfe, the mother of Vivian Wolfe. The work still hasn’t been completed because the Department of Public Safety said coming up with a model that works for a variety of cases has been more difficult than expected.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
