Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

by Lawrence Schiller

  The Denver Post’s acid column about Hunter was the first in a series of newspaper articles and TV broadcasts that would attack the Boulder DA for his office’s laid-back approach to the law.

  Plea bargaining had been a major part of Hunter’s first campaign platform, and he addressed it in his second term too. In the late 1970s, the DA’s office had to contend with fifteen hundred felonies a year, at a time when there was only one criminal judge on the bench. A judge could handle perhaps sixty cases a year, according to Hunter. By the late 1990s, Boulder County had two thousand felony cases a year and only two district court criminal judges. Like all DAs, Hunter had to handle the overflow within the financial means of the community. Even in Boulder, with its low crime rate, plea bargaining was unavoidable.

  I would have difficulty being a DA in Boulder. My personal philosophy involves taking a hard stand, using jails, using prisons, standing up to those who argue that you can fight crime by being nice to folks and seeking rehabilitation over and above punishment. Retribution has its own rehabilitative component.

  Hunter has an unusual way of resolving cases. He doesn’t call it plea bargaining. He calls it precharging negotiations, and he does it before charges are filed. It is a unique way of looking at things. You can run a system that way, an effective system, a system that’s in tune with the community. And it works very well in Boulder.

  Pete Hofstrom, who heads Hunter’s felony division, is perfect for the job. He takes everything in, is excellent analytically. He can spot an issue, understand a case, and resolve it. He’s effective in his job. But he’s not a dynamic trial lawyer.

  Everyone likes Pete. And he can flourish in a system with the Boulder prosecution philosophy for a long time.

  —Robert Grant

  Back in ’78, Alex had this no-plea-bargaining policy. It got him national attention, but I don’t think it lasted a year. We all realized that plea bargaining serves a purpose. It’s not an evil thing. It’s something that works.

  Today I’m a defense attorney in Boulder. Back then I was with the public defender’s office. During that no-plea-bargaining time, we defense attorneys were encouraged to come and have a dialogue with the DA. We plea bargained through precharging negotiations. Alex had deputy DAs screen the cases first. We would go in and lay out our case, sometimes too prematurely. At that point, a misdemeanor charge might be agreed to instead of a felony.

  Technically, you could say there were no pleas bargained, because the charges weren’t filed yet.

  Today the vestiges of that era are still in Boulder. I would say in 10 percent of my cases, maybe 15 percent, I can go to the DA and say, “We need to talk. Here’s what’s wrong with your case.” Or if we know what is likely to happen, plea bargain it before charging.

  As defense counsel, I’m always asking, Who is this defendant? And also, Who is this victim? I have to focus just as much on how much the victim has been hurt as on what has happened to my client. In other words, Pete Hofstrom and I are clones of each other. If I walk in there and just tell my client’s side without any awareness of the impact on the victim, Pete will say, “You haven’t done your homework. Come back with the other side of the story.”

  —Paul McCormick

  After I spent four years as a deputy DA for Alex Hunter, I became a judge in Boulder County. Some of us district judges would just flat-out refuse to accept plea bargains from Hunter’s office. These were cases where we could see that the defendant deserved a heavier hand. An example: Hunter’s staff would bring me someone arrested for driving under the influence and want to plead it to careless driving when it was easy to prove a prima facie* case on the actual offense. I would review it and say no.

  The only other negative reaction I ever saw to all this plea bargaining came from the police. The community never said a word.

  —Virginia Chavez

  Soon after Alex Hunter hired Pete Hofstrom in 1974, the DA’s office examined the issue of rehabilitation versus retribution for criminals. Determined to make the most of Boulder’s politically progressive attitudes, in the early 1980s Hunter initiated a series of discussions with a broad spectrum of residents. During a ten-year period, he invited more than twelve hundred groups to his office. He met mostly with women, always asking the same kinds of questions: “A seventeen-year-old kid is caught committing a robbery with a .357 magnum. Do you throw the book at him? Do you give him another chance?”

  “You get tough with anybody who brings a loaded .357 to a robbery,” more than one Boulderite told Hunter. “If you slap his wrist and give him another chance, what message does that send?”

  To some Boulderites it seemed that the DA didn’t like coming down hard on crime. To others, it seemed that Hunter wanted to be in step with Boulder’s citizens, but it was also possible that Hunter simply wanted to see if his thinking was in line with public opinion. In any case, he came away with a clearer picture of what was expected of him.

  Hofstrom and Hunter examined the concept of deferred sentences,* as well as deferred prosecution** for first-time nonviolent offenders. Hofstrom believed that if such offenders made restitution, attended appropriate rehabilitation programs, and stayed out of trouble for a minimum of two years, their cases should be dismissed and their records sealed; something short of a conviction.

  The attitude was deeply ingrained in Hofstrom, who had paid his way through college and law school by working as a prison guard and had maintained a deep interest in the plight of society’s outcasts. Alex Hunter agreed with Hofstrom’s position. As a result, rehabilitation became the first consideration for the DA’s office.

  In a small town like Boulder, an attorney doesn’t succeed or fail by his prowess in the courtroom, because so few cases go to trial. If only eight felony cases out of two thousand go to trial each year in Boulder, you have to ask yourself who really decides all those remaining cases.

  If you’re a defense attorney with such ferocious power that the DA’s office is afraid to face you in court, you’re in a fine bargaining position. Maybe there are a few attorneys like that in Boulder. But for the most part, you make deals by being on good terms with the DA’s office. That friendship is your livelihood.

  It’s not that Boulder is unique that way. What is different is this “Magic Kingdom” business. People who practice law here like to live here. For the most part, they confine their practice to Boulder. They don’t even like to go to Denver. Boulder is small; the legal community is small.

  That’s where Pete Hofstrom comes in. There’s no question he regards his job as deal-making. He’s utterly honest. He’s not greedy, not selfish. He’s not looking to make a lot of money or run for governor. He says that it’s his job to make judgments about who deserves a good deal and who doesn’t.

  He has told my law students that there are basically three kinds of people who will come to a prosecutor’s attention: one is the chronic fuckup—not really evil but unable to manage in today’s complicated world and therefore sees crime as an easy out; then there’s the hard-core criminal, a sociopath who’s greedy, selfish, doesn’t care about hurting people—someone with no conscience whatsoever; finally, there’s the citizen, a basically solid person with the right values, the right attitude, the right skills, who has now made a bad mistake.

  Pete says you have to treat these three types differently, even if they’ve all committed the same crime. And he has confidence that he can unerringly place people in one category or the other. He understands that in his job, he pretty much has the power to determine the outcome even though it’s the judge who pronounces sentence. Pete is comfortable in that role and believes he’s perfectly capable of making these judgments.

  —Marianne Wesson

  The DA’s office was soon half a step ahead of Boulder, which often found itself several steps ahead of other cities. Hunter used his office to initiate community programs. Having set up a consumer protection unit and a victim assistance program, he established a crime-prevention education program for a
ll public school children called Safe Guard, a safehouse for domestic violence prevention, and a restitution-collection program for victims of crimes.

  Hunter worked closely with Chuck Stout of the Boulder Health Department on the AIDS threat and supported the department’s controversial needle-exchange program for addicts. When a drug bust netted the county over half a million dollars, he agreed that the money should be used for the education of teen mothers who were at high risk for becoming child abusers. The resulting Genesis program won a Ford Foundation award in 1996.

  Hunter was way ahead of the curve in inaugurating and supporting such programs. He said he wanted to be innovative because Boulder expected it of him.

  Boulder is a unique city. And Alex Hunter’s strength in staying in office for twenty-five years is his identifying with the community—not in shaping the forces of the community, but in following them and anticipating what Boulder wants from a prosecutor. That is quite different from what most communities in this state want from a prosecutor.

  Boulder has been a kind of magnet for different philosophies, ideas, and academics. It’s always changing. It’s a kind of Disneyland, Colorado, where you don’t have to be at all concerned about the mundane part of life. You kind of just let it flow and things are taken care of. In Boulder, you can live in a world of ideas.

  Hunter listens well and surrounds himself with good people. He doesn’t believe he’s 90 percent and everyone else is only 10 percent. He’s a consensus builder, both in his job and in his political life. And again, I say he’s in tune with the dynamics of his community.

  Boulder lacks poverty, it lacks a ghetto—at least as a geographic entity. But there are pockets of low-income folks in the Boulder community, and there’s a hell of a lot of diversity. It’s racial, ethnic. But even the low income is at a higher level than you would normally think of in terms of a ghetto.

  Alex doesn’t fancy himself as a trial lawyer, and his ego isn’t fed in the courtroom. His ego is fed in the political arena.

  —Robert Grant

  The Boulder City Council is, in many ways, responsible for the city’s overall success. In 1967 the city agreed to tax itself to buy up tens of thousands of acres of open space, which it declared off-limits to development.

  My parents came to Denver in 1947, when I was ten, to start the Julius Hyman Company, which produced the nastiest, most dangerous insecticides. Eventually they sold the firm to Shell Oil, which continued producing the same pesticides for a long time. If I had a personal bumper sticker, it would read, “Here longer than most natives.”

  I remember that the moment we got off the train in Denver, I was disappointed—no cowboys and Indians. But I soon discovered there were lots of fields to play in, an airport where you could watch planes, and an irrigation ditch you could tube down. All that was wonderful.

  In 1960 I applied to Stanford and didn’t get in. So I ended up at CU, which had been my third choice. Actually it was a kid’s dream. The university was a kind of magic place. It had either the largest or second-largest number of astronauts among its alumni. Robert Redford used to be a waiter at the Sink. I studied history as an undergraduate and science in graduate school, but I really majored in student activism. I have to point out that I opposed the Vietnam War back when public opinion polls showed that only 1 percent of the country favored withdrawal.

  Boulder was much more isolated than Denver, although the Denver-Boulder turnpike had just opened. Boulder had the main hallmark of a boomtown, the feeling that all things are possible. In those days there were lots of transient hippies and drugs. One anti-Vietnam protest on U.S. 36 turned into a kind of bloodbath. There was lots of tear gas. The liberals didn’t seize the government until 1971, when I was thirty-five, and the present establishment wasn’t locked in until the 1976 elections. Back then, I was always in the minority, but it didn’t bother me. I understood things were changing.

  The Danish Plan was my big contribution to Boulder and was adopted by referendum in 1976. It determined the growth rate for the town by controlling the number of building permits issued every year, with just a few exceptions and grandfatherings. The number of permits allowed was based on certain criteria, like the birth rate. The city had already voted in a height limitation for new buildings. There was also the “blue line,” a zoning law which said that a building above a certain elevation couldn’t get town water. Now, of course, the city owns almost everything up in the foothills. It’s a wonderful place to live. I live just six blocks from the Rocky Mountains.

  —Paul Danish

  The city of Boulder became an island with a moat of undeveloped land around it, isolated from the other communities in Boulder County and from Denver and its surrounding municipalities. One former county commissioner called Boulder “twenty-eight square miles encircled by reality.” The restricted growth of Boulder’s residential areas led to steadily rising real estate prices. In the late 1990s, an average home cost $337,994.

  Adding to Boulder’s good fortune is the presence of a federally funded scientific research institute at the University of Colorado, whose students and staff constitute almost a third of Boulder’s population. Over 36 percent of the city’s adults have a college degree, and 26 percent have five years or more of higher education. Seven of ten Boulderites own bicycles. The result is above-average prosperity and relatively few residents whose lives are desperate enough to turn them to crime.

  I’m now the director of public information at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I used to be the city’s flack. I ran the press office. I could see everything that was happening in city government; I attended every city council meeting. The first mayor I worked for was Ruth Correll, and during her tenure the character of the town changed. Paul Danish was pushing slow growth, which attracted attention that this town had never had before. And I saw it all from the inside.

  I helped promote the green belt. We built this buffer zone around ourselves because we didn’t want to be part of the metroplex. We paid for that protection with our own taxes. Of course, it’s like building a cedar fence. When you go to the other side of that fence, it looks quite different from the outside. We always sat in here and looked at what we were building and just didn’t realize that the people on the outside were watching us build the fence.

  So Boulder became an isolated conclave.

  We have always viewed the world outside with a certain detachment, but we never seemed able to see ourselves with the same objectivity. At heart we are still a small town. Now the media comes from a place where TV news trucks are as common as taxicabs. Here in Boulder, we don’t have cabs. Or so few they’re barely visible.

  I used to walk out my front door every morning and get my newspaper, pick up my milk, and say hi to my neighbor and the kid mowing the lawn. That was my window on the world. Then there was the Simpson thing, the Susan Smith thing—all far away. Except now there’s the Ramsey thing.

  Here in Boulder, we believe we are smaller than we really are. Then when the TV lights and telephoto lenses come in, we have to realize that we aren’t as small as we thought.

  —David Grimm

  This privileged community, whose people have little reason to fear crime—this complacent community—was an ideal environment for innovators like Alex Hunter and Peter Hofstrom to calibrate law enforcement to the needs of the residents.

  In 1984 Hunter announced the formation of “domestic violence teams” to make recommendations following arrests in domestic abuse cases. Shortly afterward, he initiated a program where police officers would no longer act as referees in domestic fights but would arrest on probable cause. Then Hunter’s office would prosecute abusers, even when the victim refused to file charges.

  When six deaths from domestic violence occurred in Boulder County, outside of the city of Boulder, in the first seven months of 1993, Hunter named Kathy Delgado to head a specialized prosecution unit. Faced with the fact that by the time of trial, most domestic violence victims are no longer on the pros
ecutor’s side, Hunter urged making arrests mandatory in all cases when the police are called in a domestic violence dispute. The controversial bill, signed into state law on June 2, 1994, was designed to break the back of domestic violence.

  Hunter established hard policies on sexual assault and domestic violence. Perpetrators were sent to jail overnight or over a weekend, with no possibility of posting bond, until there could be a hearing. Hunter relented when defense attorneys argued that reputations on domestic violence cases could be ruined and civil liberties could be violated. He made no such provisions for sexual assault cases, however, and the defense bar believes that the DA’s “tuna net” has swept up many innocent people, jeopardizing their jobs and reputations. They fault Hunter for neglecting to build in fail-safes to ensure that only true criminals are targeted.