May 26, 2010 06:24 PM UTC

Suthers: The Buck Does Not Stop Here

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• by: Colorado Pols

As major media outlets around the state reported yesterday, there are two ways to look at last weekend’s bombshell revelation that during his tenure as U.S. Attorney for Colorado, John Suthers had approved the transfer of soon-to-be serial murderer Scott Kimball to Colorado to work as a criminal informant–one dense and evasive way and another, well, much simpler. As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reports:

Suthers, who served as U.S. attorney from August 2001 until January 2005, when he was appointed Colorado attorney general, said he didn’t remember signing the “Rule 20” transfer order and had no personal involvement in the case that Kimball was working on with the FBI…

“The fact of the matter is that a large U.S. attorney’s office or a large prosecutor’s office, the guys at the top probably are involved in 2 to 4 percent of the plea bargains and stuff like that,” Suthers added. “All these things go on. But when you’ve been running large public offices like I have for 18 years, sometimes situations like this that you weren’t involved in go sour and they look bad.”

Soon after his transfer to Colorado, Kimball agreed to a plea deal that got him released from prison. A month later, he killed his first victim.

Garnett said the real tragedy is that neither Suthers nor his assistants examined the case closely enough before signing the order…

Though Suthers admitted he has some responsibility in Kimball’s transfer to Colorado, Garnett said it goes much deeper. It shows that an office he ran failed to do its homework about who Kimball was, failed to monitor the situation after setting him free, and kept sealing records in the case afterward, for up to three years. [Pols emphasis]

“It may be that as they got into it that they were concerned … that they realized they had a real mess on their hands,” Garnett said. “Though they probably didn’t realize there were dead bodies, they didn’t want it to become public.”

So you can take what Suthers says about the large department he oversaw, his lack of recollection about anything related to the case (including, apparently, the document that bears his signature), and the “5 or 6” such requests he approved each month as U.S. Attorney at face value.

Or, as Stan Garnett counters, you can ask why, if this case was so obscure that nobody can recall any involvement with it, the U.S. Attorney’s office continued to seal records pertaining to the case for years afterward. You can ask that fairly obvious question before you get to the question of how Kimball was allowed to be released in Colorado to begin with while wanted for a prison escape in Montana–and who, if not the U.S. Attorney in charge, is actually responsible when one of these informant transfers “goes sour” (Suthers’ description). Our understanding of leadership is that leaders are supposed to take responsibility when something “goes sour,” but apparently blaming your staff is perfectly fine in Suthers’ case.

So says the Denver Post in today’s laughable editorial on the subject, where the board doesn’t want to “make light” of the murders of four people, but, you see, the responsibility lies with unspecified “holes in the screening process”–as opposed to the guy in charge. And, of course, the Post never even bothers to inquire why records about this case that nobody can remember kept getting sealed for years after the fact. Honestly, we don’t remember when the Post was ever so ‘understanding’ of how hard it is to be in charge, but we’ll be sure to keep it in mind.

Bottom line: all the bureaucratic excuses in the world can’t protect Suthers from serious damage over the Kimball murder spree. As we said over the weekend, it’s way too easy to lay out this story in a 30-second commercial that will absolutely horrify voters–and if the best Suthers can respond with is a bunch of finger pointing at his own subordinates and hazy nonrecollections, no amount of whitewash from the Denver Post’s editorial board, or anywhere else, is going to help.