New turn in '06 access of criminal database

Phone logs indicate that the action by staffers in the DA's office had its roots in the Ritter campaign

By Karen E. Crummy, The Denver Post, January 31, 2008

Records released Wednesday indicate a staff member at the Denver district attorney's office received a message from an employee of Bill Ritter's gubernatorial campaign about a felon whose criminal record was accessed by DA employees from a restricted federal database two days later.

Federal immigration agent Cory Voorhis has been charged with three federal misdemeanors for entering a restricted federal database and assisting the campaign of Ritter's 2006 opponent, Bob Beauprez. The agent obtained information about Carlos Estrada-Medina, an accused Denver heroin dealer who received an unusual plea agreement from Ritter's office when he was DA.

Denver DA officials have previously acknowledged that they too accessed the National Crime Information Computer to check on Estrada-Medina, saying it was done in response to media calls after a Beauprez campaign ad featuring Estrada-Medina began running on Oct. 10, 2006. But the records of cellphone calls and call logs released by the DA's office in response to a request from The Denver Post show no such media deluge. Instead, they indicate that the DA office's work on Estrada-Medina also had its roots in a campaign.

A call log maintained by DA spokeswoman Lynn Kimbrough shows that on Oct. 10, "Steph" called and asked about "Carlos Estrada-Medina." Dick Reeve, a lawyer for the DA's office, confirmed that Steph was Stephanie Villafuerte, former chief deputy DA who was working for the Ritter campaign....

Two days later, and after an exchange of at least three more phone calls between Kimbrough and Villafuerte and at least three others between Villafuerte and Assistant DA Chuck Lepley, who ordered the computer check, a DA staffer ran Estrada-Medina's name through the National Crime Information Computer.

There, they discovered that, as Beauprez's ad claimed, Estrada-Medina also was known as Walter Ramo, an accused heroin dealer who was allowed to plead guilty to trespassing on agricultural land and avoid deportation when Ritter was district attorney. He later was arrested under the other name for a sexual assault on a child in San Francisco.

The morning after the DA's office accessed the NCIC to check on Estrada-Medina, Lepley called Villafuerte's cellphone at 9:39 a.m. and then the Ritter campaign headquarters at 9:40 a.m., according to the records.

By then, Ritter had asked for an investigation to determine how Beauprez's campaign learned Ramo and Estrada-Medina were the same person....

A year later, Voorhis was charged and is awaiting trial. Since then, Voorhis' attorney and supporters have been trying to establish that others who accessed the NCIC to check on Ramo are not being prosecuted.

"The DA's office ran an NCIC check and called a campaign, and they say that doesn't break the law. So, why did Cory break the law for doing the same thing?" said Mike Riebau, a former immigration special agent who heads up a legal defense fund for Voorhis....

Reeve, the attorney for Lepley, Kimbrough and other DA employees, said that they were never asked by Villafuerte or anyone else at the Ritter campaign to access the NCIC, but when asked if information that the DA's office retrieved from the NCIC was provided to Villafuerte or others from the Ritter campaign, Reeve declined comment...

Kimbrough has said that the NCIC was checked because she had received media calls asking about the Beauprez ad, which started airing Oct. 10. Her call logs reflect no calls from media with a notation of Ramo/Estrada-Medina's name as the subject.

One reporter who did call Kimbrough and was interested in learning whether Ramo and Estrada-Medina were the same person, apparently never received an answer.

On the night of Oct. 12, 2006, after the DA staffer had accessed the database, Channel 4's Raj Chohan, who had left a call for Kimbrough on Oct. 11, posted a story at 11:36 p.m. after a "Reality Check" spot trying to verify Beauprez's ad on Ramo.

"I checked with the Denver DA's office, and they have no other aliases on file for Walter Ramo and couldn't conclusively confirm his name was actually Walter Ramo," Chohan said.

Staff writer Felisa Cardona contributed to this report.

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