The beginning of a new year traditionally is a time of hope and promise, but for me personally, as well as for NDAA and the prosecution profession, it also brings a note of sadness. The new year will officially mark the end of the prosecutorial careers of 16 of Colorado’s 22 district attorneys, including several of this association’s most active, dedicated and valued members and friends of us all. Actually, three of the DAs left office early to take other positions.
These 16 Colorado DAs were not voted out of office by their constituents. Far from it. Had they been running for re-election, they all probably would have been re-elected. But they were forced to leave by the end of the year by a state law that limits DAs to two four-year terms. Among those affected were several outstanding DAs with national reputations, including former NDAA president Stu VanMeveren of Fort Collins and Bill Ritter of Denver, an NDAA board member and former vice president, as well as chair of the APRI Board of Directors. (The complete list of Colorado DAs who have left office because of the term limits law is in the NAMES column on Page 14.)
Colorado is the only state in the United States to impose term limits on its prosecutors, and the loss of these 16 district attorneys in terms of experience and historic perspective is incalculable. What other profession, particularly one dealing with public safety and the lives of citizens, requires a practitioner to go into another line of work after eight years? To use an oft-cited example, who would you prefer to perform brain surgery on you if you needed it: a surgeon with only two or three years’ experience, but no more than eight, or an experienced surgeon with many years of experience and an earned reputation? Is justice any less important?
Stu VanMeveren, whose 32 years of distinguished service as a prosecutor earned him the unofficial title of “dean” of Colorado’s DAs and who was one of the most senior members of NDAA’s Board of Directors, put it succinctly, declaring “With the departure of us 16 DAs, the state is losing hundreds of years of prosecutorial experience, and I wonder if the people realize how vital it is to have experienced prosecutors leading the DAs’ offices in the right direction.
“The other really negative aspect of term limits,” he continued, “is this: How are you going to get the best qualified people to run for DA when they know they will be able to serve only eight years and won’t be able to make a career of it. If they had term limits in 1972 when I first ran for the job and had to give up my law practice, knowing that I could have the job for only eight years and then would have to try to go back into private practice, I never would have left private practice.”
To provide some perspective on how much prosecutorial experience has been lost by Colorado’s term limits law: Bill Ritter, who was a Denver prosecutor for 23 years, was a high school junior when Stu VanMeveren won his first election as Fort Collins DA. Four of the five term-limited DAs in the Denver metropolitan area (population: 2.3 million), began their careers in the mid and late 1970s, almost a decade before Ritter became a prosecutor. They include Dave Thomas, Jim Peters and Bob Grant.
Ritter says that although the effect of the term limits law will vary from office to office, he expects that there will be a “tremendous” turnover in some of the big offices in the ranks of deputy and assistant DAs. “This,” he says, “will require those offices to have steep learning curves, and steep learning curves, office-wide, are not a good thing to have in the justice system.”
Further, he points out, because the term limits law encompasses the entire state government except for judges, “There is now no elected DA who has been involved in any policy discussion with the legislature that goes back more than eight years. And we don’t have legislators who remember why we put in place mandatory sentencing in the 1990s. So we now have a term-limited legislature and by and large a new crop of DAs who are setting policy, without the institutional history that is absolutely critical to informed decision making.”
The term limits movement in Colorado began in the late 1980s and climaxed in 1990 with passage of a constitutional amendment mandating term limits for most state officials, including the governor, state treasurer, and members of the state legislature, but excluding judges and not mentioning DAs. In 1994, the group behind the term limits movement successfully pushed through another constitutional amendment, expanding term limits to all state and local officials except judges, but including DAs. “It was not directed specifically at DAs,” Ritter says. “It was just that we got swept up in the torrent of term limit passion that involved all local offices.” In 2002, the state’s DAs sponsored a referendum on the issue of exempting DAs from term limits. It lost by a 65-35 margin.
The issue was settled in 2004 when the Colorado Supreme Court ended a lengthy court challenge to the term limits law, ruling in Davidson, Colorado Secretary of State v. Sandstrom—yes, that is our Gus Sandstrom, DA of Pueblo County, who has since announced his retirement—that the inclusion of DAs in the term limits law followed the intent of the voters. The court also noted that the voters in any political subdivision had the right to “lengthen, shorten or eliminate” term limits, thus opening the possibility of a DA or other elected official putting the issue of term limit exemption to a vote in a ballot initiative in their jurisdiction.
Bill Ritter thinks the reason Coloradans favor term limits for their state officials, including legislators, is that they believe that those officials, being politicians, depend increasingly on campaign contributions from special interests to maintain their incumbency, and therefore that term limits would diminish if not eliminate the link between money and incumbency.
What dismays Ritter is that by rejecting the DAs’ proposal for term limits exemption in the 2002 referendum, the voters apparently and mistakenly linked DAs with those public officials.
“Of course Colorado prosecutors have to raise money and run for election,” he says, “but by and large you can’t tell a Democrat DA from a Republican DA here. We are not political people; we are professional people, and in that sense we’re very different from a state legislator, or even a mayor or governor. We don’t have a political agenda. We have a justice agenda.”
The noted theologian/philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Experienced DAs like Stu VanMeveren, Bill Ritter and the others stand at the ramparts of democracy, protecting their fellow citizens from injustice and seeking justice for all. How can you put term limits on that?
We at NDAA congratulate Colorado’s new DAs, wish them well and hope they’ll take advantage of the many benefits of NDAA membership and maintain Colorado’s record as a 100 percent NDAA membership state. But we also hope that they will understand our regret that so many of our longtime friends and professional colleagues in Colorado had to leave office because of a well-intentioned but misguided law.
