The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Like stepping back in time
The Gunnison County Commissioners received a visit from 7th Judicial District Attorney Dan Hotsenpiller this week. Hotsenpiller was appointed DA by Governor John Hickenlooper in January 2011 after the former DA, Myrl Serra, was arrested and charged with sex-related crimes against some of his employees.
Hotsenpiller wanted the commissioners to know that since his appointment, he’s been cleaning up a DA’s office about 30 years behind the times.
“We know that the guy who had the chair before me did a lot of damage to the place and to the people who work there. One of the things that’s really phenomenal is that there was no management, no leadership. The place did not move forward at all,” Hotsenpiller told the commissioners.
Hotsenpiller added that while moving into his office—which now has a glass door instead of the heavy oak door used by his predecessor—he found a drawer full of old files. He’d left them there himself in 2002 when he moved from the DA’s office to the U.S. Attorney’s office. They apparently hadn’t been touched since.
“It was spooky. That’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with,” he said.
The office had only one scanner, and staff had been told not to use it because each scan cost a penny. There was no website and no system for digitizing case files. On Tuesday, Hotsenpiller showed the commissioners two pieces of paper: a police report for a 1989 felony case.
“The guy was 18 when he committed the crime in Montrose. What he did was, he trashed the rental house he was renting, back in 1989. That was a class 4 felony—go to prison for six, maybe up to 12 years,” he said.
Hotsenpiller didn’t know about the crime until the man was arrested in North Carolina this spring, and the DA’s office suddenly had to decide whether to extradite him for a crime that had literally been buried in a drawer all that time.
The decision was made easy by the fact that the victim would have been 108 years old if she were still alive. But the situation exemplified the lack of proper filing and handling, and also illustrated how reporting had changed since the 1980s.
Hotsenpiller pointed out that the 1989 felony report was two pages. Now, he continued, the amount of information gathered includes video and audio recordings from multiple officers, surveillance footage from retailers like Walmart and even recordings and transcripts from smart phones. To be up to date, the DA’s office needs to change how it operates.
He also told the commissioners that he anticipates funding challenges. The DA’s office receives funding from the counties it serves, some grant funding for victim services, and limited federal funding to cover 80 percent of his salary. Yet state statutes continue to increase DA obligations through unfunded mandates, and some funding mechanisms are expected to dry up.
Hotsenpiller did not ask the commissioners for additional funding, but he did explain that income generated through paper production for defense lawyers and a check fraud program is on the decline. As those programs dissolve, it could eventually result in more than a $25,000 loss in the DA’s budget.
The DA was not all doom and gloom, however. He told the commissioners that he and the staff finally have their feet under them. Staff has been reorganized, the office will have a website within a month, and they have started to archive paper files through digital storage.
“It’s time now to start moving this thing forward and we are back to doing what we need to be doing, which is focusing on public safety, working with our partners and starting to figure out how we can move forward to be more effective and keep doing what we need to do,” Hotsenpiller said.
