Just when it looked like the controversy surrounding a plea bargain then-District Attorney Bill Ritter’s office gave to an illegal immigrant was dead, Republican lawmakers have raised its specter in a proposed state constitutional amendment.
The proposed amendment would prohibit prosecutors from plea bargaining cases involving defendants in the country illegally to crimes that would allow the defendant to avoid being immediately deported.
The issue harkens back to a controversy that enveloped the gubernatorial race between Ritter, a Democrat, and Republican Bob Beauprez. Beauprez said Ritter’s office would sometimes plea bargain cases involving illegal and legal immigrants to charges of “agricultural trespassing” so that the defendants could avoid deportation.
In particular, Beauprez ran an attack ad accusing Ritter of just such a plea bargain with an illegal immigrant originally charged with dealing heroin. That controversy then exploded when Ritter accused the Beauprez campaign of obtaining the information by illegally accessing a federal criminal database. That, in turn, led to an immigration agent being charged in federal court for accessing the database and passing the information to Beauprez’s campaign. And it all ended just last week, when a jury acquitted the agent, Cory Voorhis, of the charges.
But Sen. Ted Harvey, a Highlands Ranch Republican who is a co-sponsor of the proposed amendment with almost every other Republican in the state legislature, said the amendment isn’t meant as a political slap at the governor.
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