August William "Bill" Ritter, Jr., grew up on a five-acre wheat farm in Aurora, Colo., the sixth of 12 children to William Sr. and Ethel Ritter, where he came to view government as a partner for people in need after his alcoholic father abandoned the family when Bill Jr. was just 13 and Ritter's mom had to go on welfare.
Ethel Ritter took a job as a bookkeeper and sent her children to work, too, to support the family. Bill Jr. was just 14 when he joined a union and took his first job in construction, a job that would eventually help pay his way through college.
Ritter's Catholic faith has helped shape his life dramatically. But it also has twice proven politically controversial when he was being considered for public office and rank-and-file Democrats complained that his opposition to abortion rights, a vigorously defended part of the Democratic Party's platform, made him a suspect Democrat. The depth of Ritter's faith even surprised his family.
Ritter was just entering high school when, on a trip to Texas with a friend, he visited a Catholic seminary in San Antonio and decided to enroll there. He attended St. Anthony Catholic High School in San Antonio from 1970 to 1972 before deciding he didn't want to become a priest after all. He returned to Colorado, where he was a member of the first graduating class of Gateway High School in Aurora in 1974. He was a lineman and captain of Aurora's football team, which at the time had the distinction of losing every one of its games.
Ritter spent years trying to reconcile with his father, Bill Sr., including spending time at a Salvation Army shelter playing cards with his father while Bill Sr. was fighting alcoholism. Bill Sr. eventually moved in with Ritter and lived with him for more than two years. For Bill Sr.'s 75th birthday, Ritter and his extended family rented a bus and drove to Utah where his father was living to celebrate what the family dubbed "The Forgiveness Tour." Bill Sr. died in 2005 and never saw his son become governor of Colorado.
Law Career
Ritter was still in law school at the University of Colorado, considering a career in labor law, when in 1980 he accepted an internship at the Denver district attorney's office. He fell in love with being a prosecutor and went to work for the DA's office full-time after graduation.
As a deputy district attorney, Ritter once spent three weeks in a jail cell - for his own protection. He had been sent to Colorado's Baca County as a special prosecutor in a case involving three farmers who assaulted local police officers during a courthouse-steps auction of a tax-delinquent farm owned by one of the men. With tensions in the community running high, the local sheriff told Ritter the cell was the only place he could ensure the prosecutor's safety. One farmer was found guilty of a felony and the two others of misdemeanors during the three-week trial. But after talking with the deputies who had been attacked but escaped serious injury, Ritter arranged for the farmers to be placed on probation in hopes of helping the divided community recover.
Missionary Work in Zambia
In 1983, Ritter married Jeannie Lewis, who he'd met in high school,and they had a one-year-old son - the first of four - when, in 1986, they decided to quit a life of relative comfort and go to work as Catholic missionaries in a desperately-impoverished area of Zambia in Africa.
Falling back on lessons learned on the family's tiny farm, Ritter raised chickens and used their eggs to provide villagers with protein. He helped fishermen get their fish to larger markets, set up mills to grind their maize and sorghum, and introduced different varieties of rice that grew well in the local climate. Jeannie Ritter worked with women on neo-natal care and other health issues and prodded them to add new foods to their diets.
AIDS was ravishing Africa when the Ritters arrived in Zambia, and the couple spent a lot of time educating villagers about the dangers of the virus and ways to prevent its spread, including the use of condoms, which broke with traditional Catholic church orthodoxy.
Ritter confronted his greatest personal tragedy while in Zambia, as well. He was driving a pickup truck to a nutrition center in Mongu when a local elderly man stepped onto the road. Ritter swerved to avoid him, but the back of the truck struck the man. Despite police warnings to drivers to leave the scene of such accidents and report them later to avoid confrontations with locals, Ritter and a companion put the man into the truck and drove him to a hospital The man, who Ritter would later learn was the father of a local priest he knew, died the following morning. The incident was ruled an accident.
The Ritters returned to Colorado after three years and Ritter took a job in the U.S. attorney's office in Denver. In 1993, when Denver's district attorney quit for a job in the private sector, then-Gov. Roy Romer (D) turned to Ritter. Abortion-right supporters protested Ritter's appointment to the governor. But Romer was impressed with Ritter's service in Zambia, and after meeting twice with Ritter at the governor's mansion to discuss his views, Romer appointed him anyway.
Prosecutor
Ritter proved to be an innovative prosecutor. He's credited with creating the nation's first drug court to handle non-violent drug cases that had been clogging the courts' docket and to redirect convicted drug offenders to treatment programs rather than prison. Since then, other states have created more than 2,100 drug courts even as Ritter's court, criticized as being too lenient and ineffective, was quietly closed in 2002. Denver's drug court re-opened in 2007 after the sheer volume of drug-related felonies swamped the criminal courts.
Ritter also instituted programs that offered young offenders a chance to avoid a criminal record and make amends by volunteering, working with adult mentors or taking classes to help them cope with life's demands.
But Ritter was widely criticized by community leaders for refusing to prosecute any of the Denver police officers involved in 70 shooting cases in which they wounded or killed someone, including one in which police enforcing a no-knock warrant burst into a house of a man who had a gun and shot him to death before realizing they were at the wrong address. In many of those cases, the police were accused of using excessive force and the city spent $3 million to settle several of them.
Ritter championed victims' rights, especially in domestic violence and sexual- assault cases and created a model program, the Victim Services Network, which coordinated the resources of various social-service agencies. But his office also earned a reputation for having the most cases in which it successfully sent teenagers to prison for life without the possibility of parole, including one case that Ritter prosecuted himself, drawing protests from human-rights groups.
2006 Governor's Race
Ritter twice won election as district attorney before term limits required him to step down after 12 years in 2005. He went to work briefly for one of the state's most prestigious law firms, Hogan & Hartson in Denver, before entering the 2006 governor's race to succeed Gov. Bill Owens (R), who was barred from seeking another term.
Like a number of other Western governors - including Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) of Montana and Gov. Jim Gibbons (R) of Nevada - Ritter ran largely on the promise of creating a "new energy economy" in Colorado, pledging that 20 percent of the state's energy would be generated by renewable sources by the end of his first term.
Ritter's position anti-abortion rights position again alienated many of Colorado's rank-and-file Democrats, but efforts to find a prominent Democrat to run against him failed and the only challenger to enter the primary race, state Rep. Gary Lindstrom of Breckenridge, eventually dropped out, leaving Ritter as the sole Democrat running.
Ritter faced Rep. Bob Beauprez (R) in the general election but benefited greatly from Beauprez's missteps. Beauprez at one point claimed that "70 percent" of African-American pregnancies "end in abortion." He angered veterans by appearing at a photo-op wearing a military uniform even though he had gotten three student deferments to avoid service in Vietnam. And when Beauprez tried to attack Ritter for accepting too many plea bargains as district attorney, the charge backfired when it was revealed that Beauprez's campaign was being investigated by the FBI for illegally using a federal database to gather information about one such plea bargain. Ritter won,57 percent to 40 percent.
Gubernatorial Career
Though Ritter won with strong support from labor unions, one of his first acts as governor was to veto a bill that would have made it easier for unions to organize in the state. Teamsters President James P. Hoffa was so angry that he confronted Ritter at the Gridiron Dinner in Washington warning that labor issues could "blow up" the 2008 Democratic National Convention to be held in Denver.
Ritter escaped injury on July 16, 2007, when a man dressed in a tuxedo and claiming to be the "emperor" ran toward the governor's office, a handgun in his belt, shouting, "You're gonna pay for this." Ritter was in his office interviewing a judicial candidate at the time. A state trooper shot and killed the man before he could reach
Ritter hosted the 2008 Democratic National Convention that formally conferred the party's presidential nomination upon Barack Obama and Obama repaid the favor the following year when he flew to Denver to sign his $787 billion economic stimulus bill, drawing particular attention to its investment in - and Ritter's work on - alternative energy.
Retirement
In January 2010, Ritter announced that he wouldn't seek re-election that year, making the race very competitive.
Three Republicans had entered the race before Ritter announced his retirement, including state Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry; former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, Penry's former boss; and Evergreen businessman Dan Maes.
With Ritter out, Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was also mentioned as a possible contender.
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