Two of the state’s most prominent law enforcement figures have spent the month bickering in the pages of the Phil Anschutz-owned Gazette. What started with a broadside from former and would-be future District Attorney George Brauchler against Denver District Attorney Beth McCann has devolved into a back-and-forth race to the bottom as the prosecutors take turns embodying the worst impulses of the American justice system.
It started on October 4 when Brauchler, who served eight years as the DA in Arapahoe County’s 18th Judicial District and is currently running for the role in the newly created 23rd Judicial District, used his column space in the Colorado Springs Gazette to attack McCann for what he described as her office’s lenient approach to murder prosecutions.
“There is something weird going on in the Denver criminal courts. It is an approach to ‘justice’ that the public does not know,” Brauchler started, before taking McCann to task for prosecuting decisions in a number of murder cases. Through the column, Brauchler attacked McCann and her office for pushing for sentences of “only” 60 years in one case, 30 years in another, and so on, arguing that these are light sentences which risk the public’s safety, and insinuating that McCann only seeks lengthy sentences for white people.
It was the kind of crass and hamfisted argument Brauchler is known for. And that could have been the end of it, if McCann had the sense to not voluntarily participate in a Brauchler campaign stunt. But she didn’t, and on October 10 she followed in the grand tradition of Democrats across the country and walked into the Republican’s trap.
When McCann shot back at Brauchler in the Gazette’s pages the week after his initial column, she did not do so by confronting his flawed assumption that long sentences somehow enhance public safety or by reminding him of the many similar decisions he made when he last occupied the prosecutor’s seat. Instead, she completely conceded to Brauchler’s framing of the argument, and then attempted to beat him at it. She did not succeed.
In McCann’s reply – ‘rebuttal’ strikes me as the wrong word, given that she expressed no actual difference of opinion from Brauchler – she claimed that Brauchler “cherry-picked” examples of her lenient style, then proceeded to argue that she’s every bit as tough-on-crime as the bloodthirsty Fox News cosplay prosecutors who Brauchler constantly apes, even boasting that her office recently recommended sentencing a child to 60 years in prison. All part, she says, of “making Denver a safer city.”
“Brauchler points to a case in which a judge recently sentenced a defendant who pleaded guilty to murder to seven years in the Youthful Offender System, overlooking that my prosecutors argued for a 60-year prison sentence,” McCann wrote.
At no point does McCann seem to have paused and questioned the wisdom of engaging in this feud in the pages of a news outlet with a clear agenda; an outlet running paid ads parroting Donald Trump’s false claims about Venezuelan gangs conquering Aurora and driving up crime.
Having found his prey a willing participant in the hunt, Brauchler came back for another round last week. This time, he dropped most of the charade and got to his real point for engaging in the endeavor: to position himself in the press as a no-nonsense crime-fighter in a bid to help his ongoing campaign, using Denver and its DA as props.
“Three facts are undeniable,” Brauchler claimed, before making three false claims. “Reports of violence in Denver have nearly doubled in the last decade; Denver’s violent crime rate is more than double the national median; the likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime in Denver is double that of the rest of Colorado.”
It doesn’t matter to Brauchler that none of these claims are true (Greenwood Village literally has a higher crime rate than Denver: 82.93 out of 1,000 for the suburb versus 74.14 out of 1,000 for the city) – and it probably won’t matter to McCann either when she chooses to respond despite none of these claims being true.
And that’s been the most baffling thing to me about the back-and-forth: neither prosecutor seems to care that they are both wrong.
If keeping Coloradans safe is the goal, both McCann and Brauchler are barking up the wrong tree. Throughout the bickering, both prosecutors have treated the assumption that longer sentences result in less crime as a matter of established fact. In reality, it’s a faith proposition for prosecutors, undercut by the available evidence.
Research has consistently shown that sentence length has an impact on recidivism – an individual’s likelihood of reoffending after being released – but that the effect is most clearly seen with sentences of between five and ten years. According to the United States Sentencing Commission’s 2022 report on the subject, “The odds of recidivism were approximately 18 percent lower for offenders sentenced to more than 60 months up to 120 months incarceration.” But when McCann and Brauchler take pains to stunt on 60-plus year sentences, they are not doing so in hopes that the actual offender will not offend again – octogenarians do not commit many violent crimes – but on the assumption that fear of longer sentences will deter others from committing crimes. On that front, they are entirely wrong.
According to the National Institute for Justice, an arm of the Department of Justice, “increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.” Prisons, according to the Institute, “are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime.” Neither Brauchler nor McCann seems aware of this fact.
Not only are both prosecutors arguing in the face of clear evidence about the impact of long sentences on public safety, they are also failing to use their roles or platforms to advocate for evidence-based public safety initiatives – things which actually make us safer.
There is no shortage of evidence that focusing on crime prevention, as opposed to focusing solely on crime punishment, is both a more effective means of ensuring public safety, and more cost-efficient to boot. “Policymakers and community leaders should…identify and reject criminal legal system policies that have failed to improve safety or have actively harmed communities,” a recent paper by the Center for American Progress said. “Simultaneously, leaders should prioritize building infrastructure and services that prevent crime and foster well-being in the communities most harmed by crime. Many of these prevention strategies can be implemented at lower costs than arrest and incarceration, and they also hold the greatest promise of durable reductions in crime and violence.”
CAP’s report also provides significant evidence for the role that police accountability can play in reducing crime rates and improving public safety, and asserts that “eliminating aggressive policing tactics” can “improve police-community relations and crime investigation outcomes.” On that front, both Brauchler and McCann have shown themselves entirely disinterested. During McCann’s whole tenure in office, for example, Denver has had one of the top-ten deadliest police departments in the country.
In the thousands of words spilled so far in their exchange of acrimonious letters, neither prosecutor has mentioned any of these facts.
There was a time when the liberal member of a duo like McCann and Brauchler would have mentioned some of this; a time when someone like McCann would have attempted to catch Brauchler flat-footed on his bare misstatements and clear misapprehension of the facts. Instead, McCann submitted to the standard post-2020 capitulation that – even though nobody actually defunded any police – only conservatives can be taken seriously on crime, and has proceeded to act like one.
Like everywhere else in the country, Denver as a city and the state of Colorado as a whole are immeasurably safer than in 1990. The Covid-era “spike” in crime was barely a rounding error in the three-decade decline in American crime rates. Brauchler has clear reasons for obscuring this fact – his career prospects are irreversibly pinned to his ability to convince Republican voters that crime is running rampant, and his current day job is as the spokesman for Advance Colorado‘s Proposition 128, which would slash parole eligibility in the state – but I expected better of McCann than to cede the ground entirely.
My argument is not that murderers should receive lenient sentences. I believe that murderers should in fact go to jail. My argument is that prosecutors bickering with each other about who can secure the longest sentence is political theater completely detached from what we know about crime and public safety. The role of prosecutor should be about ensuring the public’s safety, but Brauchler, McCann, and DAs around the country have internalized the message that the clearest route to their political futures is to treat the role as revolving around the spectacle of public punishment – often at the expense of public safety.
Unfortunately, Brauchler has a political future: his election next month to the office of District Attorney for the state’s new 23rd Judicial District (covering Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln Counties) is all but guaranteed. McCann, however, is finally on the way out, with Denver voters choosing her replacement in two weeks. I do not know if she has ambitions for a political future, but I know that her political present has not earned her one. If I were advising McCann about whether to seek future office, I would encourage her to choose the move she should have chosen when Brauchler first challenged her to this ill-advised, under-informed clash of egos: don’t.
