Immigration agent Cory Voorhis was acquitted Wednesday of improperly using a restricted federal database to aid Bob Beauprez’s 2006 campaign for governor.
After a seven-day trial, the jurors reached their decision in 2-1/2 hours.
Juror Craig Disney, 44, of Westminster said that the jury didn’t think Voorhis had “done anything intentionally wrong” and that there were “some feelings” he may have been unfairly “singled out” for prosecution.
“He had a responsibility to do his job,” Disney said about Voorhis’ looking up potential illegal immigrants in the database.
After the verdict was read, the standing-room-only crowd in federal court broke into cheers and claps. Voorhis, who did not speak publicly, shook hands with the prosecutors who brought the charges and then hugged his tearful wife.
It was not immediately clear whether Voorhis, who has two children, would return to work as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. He has been on unpaid leave pending the outcome of the trial and living off his savings and help from friends for months, said his lawyer Bill Taylor of Denver’s Holland & Hart LLP.
An administrative agency under the federal Department of Homeland Security must review the case, then make a recommendation to a disciplinary panel. However, when asked whether Voorhis wanted his old job back, Taylor said: “I think Cory needs to take some time to think about what he wants to do.”
2 misdemeanor counts
Voorhis, 39, faced two misdemeanor counts for obtaining information about the identity of an illegal immigrant from the restricted National Crime Information Center database and giving it to Beauprez’s gubernatorial campaign.
A political ad targeting then-
Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter, Republican Beauprez’s Democratic gubernatorial opponent, claimed that an illegal immigrant charged with heroin possession was allowed to plead guilty to agricultural trespassing. After receiving probation, the man was charged with committing a sex crime on a minor in California (the charges later were dropped, but that was not included in the ad). Because the man used different names in each case, Voorhis connected the two by running the names, and others, through the restricted database.
When the ad ran, Ritter contended that the only way Beauprez’s campaign could have obtained that information was through the restricted database. Declaring that Beauprez’s campaign had broken the law, Ritter demanded an investigation.
On Wednesday, Evan Dreyer, spokesman for now-Gov. Ritter, said: “The process has now run its course, and we respect the jury’s findings.”
Taylor said the not-guilty verdict showed that the jury did not think the case was about partisan politics.
“It’s hard for people in politics to understand that those outside of politics do things for different reasons than they do,” Taylor said. “Cory was trying to shed light on a practice that jeopardized public safety.”
Voorhis “a hero”
Beauprez, a former congressman, said he left a message for Voorhis on Wednesday offering to help him with his legal fees.
“What I said 18 months ago still stands: He is a hero for having the courage to expose a terrible injustice,” Beauprez said.
Voorhis is a veteran ICE agent who headed a five-year investigation of the leader of a Mexican crime family that authorities said controlled one of the largest document-forgery rings ever to operate in the United States. The probe ended in a 2005 federal indictment.
Karen Crummy: 303-954-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com
