Ex-prison official in exile after harassment conviction

A former state prisons official who retired under a cloud in 2006 pleaded guilty in Fremont County this week to harassing his estranged wife and persuading a state employee to run a restricted background check on her boyfriend.

Nolin Lee Renfrow — who began his 27-year career as a prison guard and rose to become director of prisons for the state Department of Corrections — is now banned from entering a 12-county swath of central Colorado.

The unusual restriction was part of plea agreement reached Monday in a Cañon City courtroom that allowed Renfrow to avoid a prison sentence.

The case involved a complaint from Renfrow’s then-wife, who told police that Renfrow repeatedly violated a restraining order she filed Aug. 11, 2008, after an earlier incident in which he allegedly he kicked down her front door during a quarrel over their ongoing divorce.

Prosecutors alleged that Renfrow or an accomplice sneaked into her yard — from which Renfrow had been banned — and took down the license plate of her boyfriend’s pickup parked next to her house.

On Jan. 21, Renfrow persuaded a prison security worker to run the plate through a state investigative database maintained by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and restricted to law enforcement agencies.

At the time, the retired prisons boss was working with Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., which won a state contract to help build a prison complex in Cañon City. Renfrow told the security officer that the license plate was from a vehicle that had been abandoned at the construction site.

He ended up calling the boyfriend’s employers and telling them about the man’s relationship with his estranged wife.

Renfrow pleaded guilty to three counts of violating a protection order and one count of false reporting, all misdemeanors.  Prosecutors agreed to dismiss a felony count of stalking and five felony counts of intimidating a victim.

He received a five-year suspended sentence that will that also bars him from possessing any firearms or entering a 12-county region of central Colorado, including Fremont, Teller and El Paso counties. Court records to not specify why Renfrow was banned from the area, and his attorney, Samuel McClure of Canon City, did not return phone messages seeking a comment.

Renfrow, 53, started with the Department of Corrections as a guard in August 1978 and served as the warden of Sterling Correctional Facility in Sterling and director of facilities management before rising to director of prisons, said Katherine Sanguinetti, a spokeswoman for the state prisons, headquartered in Colorado Springs.

His career came to a well-publicized end in January of 2006, when he retired amid sharp criticism surrounding his taking vacation and sick leave to be a consultant to companies bidding for a prison contract. The Criminal Bureau of Investigation probed the deal and the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office found no evidence of wrongdoing, said CBI spokesman Lance Clem.