The Voorhis prosecution

Why wasn't a related case in Texas followed, too?

Editorial, Rocky Mountain News
November 27, 2007

Thirteen months after the "leakgate" scandal hit the Colorado governor's race, we're still waiting for someone to explain why the arrest records and aliases of illegal immigrants should be kept secret from public view.

We're still wondering what an agent with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement allegedly did that was so wrong.

Why shouldn't the public know that an immigrant arrested in Colorado for heroin possession and an immigrant arrested in California for sexual battery, under a different name, are the same man? Arrest records are public records. Aliases are public records. So what if the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) was accessed to determine that two apparently different criminals were in fact the same man?

And so what if the information was used in a political campaign - in this case, by that of Republican candidate for governor Bob Beauprez?

Ah, but the law must be enforced, even when its application is absurd. Even when a particular enforcement does nothing to protect legitimate privacy interests or the integrity of law enforcement investigations.

Why this tirade today? Because the leakgate scandal is back in the news. Lawyers for ICE agent Cory Voorhis, who has been charged with accessing NCIC and then supplying information to the Beauprez campaign, recently filed a motion in court alleging selective prosecution and insisting that the agent broke no laws. And they offer up a number of reasons, ranging from the fact that the information involved foreign nationals rather than U.S. citizens to Voorhis' "First Amendment right to petition a U.S. congressman."

We won't try to disentangle the value of these various claims - except to say that if they don't hold up and Voorhis did break the law, the prosecution won't be entirely pointless. You can't have federal agents selectively flouting a statute, even when its particular application makes no sense.

On its surface, though, the argument that Voorhis is being selectively prosecuted does seem to have meat. A private investigator from Texas apparently had a friend in the Harris County District Attorney's office access NCIC for information on the same illegal immigrant. Not only isn't that leaker being prosecuted, the incident wasn't seriously probed.

Voorhis' attorneys also suggest that the Denver district attorney's office improperly provided information to the Bill Ritter campaign - although the evidence for that is far less persuasive. But the underlying point is hard to dismiss: If you're going to prosecute someone for releasing information that should be generally available anyway, the least you should do in the interest of fairness is make sure that everyone else who did it gets charged as well.

Read the complete article.

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