Touting the “several hours of on-air discussion and off-air investigation” that 630 KHOW-AM's Peter Boyles purportedly conducted regarding the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent Cory Voorhis, Chuck Green in a November 28 column in The Pueblo Chieftain and on the Aurora Sentinel & Daily Sun website repeated several of Boyles' distortions related to Gov. Bill Ritter's (D) record as Denver district attorney. That record was the subject of attack ads produced by Ritter's 2006 gubernatorial opponent, Bob Beauprez, using information that Voorhis allegedly obtained after misusing his access to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database.

Claiming that Voorhis' “interests were pure,” Green repeated the unsubstantiated claim that in providing information related to Ritter's January 2002 plea agreement in the case of Walter Ramo, Voorhis “was exposing” a purported “Ritter policy of protecting illegal immigrants who had committed criminal offenses in Denver.” Further, Green repeated the assertion that Ramo was “a heroin dealer” -- without acknowledging that, as Colorado Media Matters has noted, the Denver district attorney's office reportedly explained that prosecutors could not establish that Ramo was a heroin dealer and that “evidence problems” caused the office to seek a plea agreement in Ramo's case.

From Chuck Green's column, published November 28 in The Pueblo Chieftain and on the Aurora Sentinel & Daily Sun website:

There are no better examples of the powers of talk radio than two ongoing stories in Colorado -- a court decision to give title to a valuable parcel of land in Boulder to a neighboring couple, and the prosecution of a federal agent for his involvement in last year's gubernatorial election.

[...]

The more important story that the newspapers tried to overlook is the one involving the federal agent, immigration officer Cory Voorhis. This story has been the subject of several hours of on-air discussion and off-air investigation by KHOW's Peter Boyles.

Voorhis is being prosecuted for accessing a federal data base to recover facts about the criminal history of an illegal immigrant, a heroin dealer who, during a plea bargain, was convicted only for trespassing on agricultural land -- a laughable disposition. The very favorable deal was provided by the office of District Attorney Bill Ritter, a Democrat who successfully ran for governor last year.

In stating that Voorhis researched the criminal history of an illegal immigrant “heroin dealer” and then dismissing the defendant's plea bargain conviction for “trespassing on agricultural land” as “a laughable disposition,” Green reiterated a distortion that Boyles made on his November 8 broadcast. As Colorado Media Matters noted, the Denver district attorney's office stated in response to such allegations during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign that prosecutors could not establish that the man at the center of the allegations, identified as Ramo, was a “heroin dealer.”

The written version of an October 11, 2006, KUSA 9News “Truth Test” analysis of the Beauprez campaign's anti-Ritter “Case File” ad stated, “Denver District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Lynn Kimbrough said the only witness to Ramo's alleged heroin dealing was the driver of the car he was arrested with. Ramo had no drugs in his possession when he was arrested and the heroin was found in the floorboard of the driver's car. Criminal background checks on the driver revealed a prior felony conviction for drug dealing.”

Similarly, the written version of KCNC CBS4's “Reality Check” from October 12, 2006, reported that “Kimbrough said the case [against Ramo] had evidence problems.” CBS4 further reported:

What kind of problems? Before police arrested Ramo in 2001, he was spotted getting out of a car. Police arrested the driver of that car, and found him with drugs. The driver said he bought the drugs from Ramo. When police caught up with Ramo, they found he had no drugs, and no criminal record in Colorado. But the driver who told police about Ramo did have a criminal record. So prosecutors found themselves wondering who to believe.

After making the distortion about Ramo in his column, Green cited a purported “Ritter policy of protecting illegal immigrants”:

Voorhis, a decorated federal agent whose career now is in jeopardy, is guilty of nothing but disclosing truthful, public information -- although he presumably gathered it by abusing his access to computer files.

His interests were pure -- he was exposing the hypocrisy of the Ritter policy of protecting illegal immigrants who had committed criminal offenses in Denver. In his frustration of trying to enforce the law, and tired of political deception, he crossed the line.

In stating that Ritter had a “policy of protecting illegal immigrants,” Green echoed Boyles' repeated false claim that the plea bargains Ritter granted as Denver DA protected illegal immigrants from deportation. As Colorado Media Matters noted following Boyles' November 14 show, while plea deals Ritter's office approved might have helped legal immigrants avoid deportation, illegal immigrants are subject to deportation by federal officials regardless of any pleas to which they agree, according to U.S. law.

Moreover, as Ritter's campaign repeatedly stated before the November 7, 2006, election, aliens unlawfully present in the United States are always subject to deportation as defined by federal law. The Rocky Mountain News similarly reported on June 11, 2006, that “unlawful presence” in the United States is in and of itself a deportable offense: “The most common charge against those caught without authorization in the U.S. is 'unlawful presence,' a civil offense. The penalty is removal, and an immigrant can be detained in the meantime.”

As Colorado Media Matters further noted, The Denver Post reported in an October 1, 2006, article that, in responding to questions about his use of agricultural trespass pleas, Ritter spoke of his proactive approach to reporting possibly deportable defendants to federal immigration authorities:

Ritter said that his office handled 38,000 cases during that seven-year period and agricultural trespass pleas made up less than 1 percent of them.

He also said he insisted his office contact immigration officials whenever a defendant was an illegal immigrant or had questionable immigration status.

“It was up to the federal government to deport them,” Ritter said.

He also noted that the scarce resources in his office were used to prosecute violent and serious offenders and, sometimes, cases had evidentiary issues where a plea to a lesser charge was better than losing at trial.

“We had 5,500 cases a year and seven judges,” he said. “Our priority was to try the most serious cases.”

Other distortions that Boyles recently has made related to the Voorhis case include the claims that the charges against Voorhis resulted from Ritter “trying to get even” and that while Ritter was district attorney, personnel in his office misused the NCIC database in a way similar to what Voorhis is alleged to have done. Colorado Media Matters has addressed these claims here and here, respectively.