Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, who sits on the Reapportionment Commission, has been caught in an outright lie by Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson. At a Reapportionment hearing on Monday, Webb made the claim that an Arapahoe County prison was put into HD37 by the GOP in order to make it a "minority influence" district.

Not only did no one ever call it a "minority influence" district, other than Webb, but it turns out the prison population doesn't change the percentage of minorities in the district by even one half of one percent!

On Tuesday, Sheriff Grayson Robinson emailed legislators to equip them with the facts about the prison population that Wellington Webb used as a political prop to call Republicans racist. You can see a copy of his email after the jump.

Based on the figures about the ethnic breakdown of the prison population, it turns out if the prison were excluded the minority population in the district would stay exactly the same, which is slightly less than 20%. 

Here are the facts:

Proposed HD37 population (w/prison): 77,547
Caucasian (w/prison): 62,099 (80.08%)
Minority (w/prison): 15,448 (19.92%)

Proposed HD37 population (w/o prison): 76,338
Caucasian (w/o prison): 61,406 (80.44%)
Minority (w/o prison): 14,932 (19.46%)

Before even checking his facts, Wellington Webb pulled out the race card and said Republicans were "us[ing] the minority community as pawns for political advantage."

Webb's rush to call Republicans racist based on completely made up facts is deserving of a full editorial smack down. Were a Republican to make up this lie you can be sure it would be reported wide and far. 

We expect all newspapers that reported Webb's incendiary and flat-out untrue allegation prints these facts tomorrow. To not inform their readers of the facts would make them complicit in lies and slander. Hopefully the press is at least above that in Colorado.