A district judge in Pueblo on Friday erased the municipal contempt of court convictions and sentences for three people, finding city judges had illegally jailed the defendants.
Pueblo District Court Judge Michelle Chostner ruled that the municipal court’s use of contempt violated the three defendants’ constitutional rights to due process because the city never gave them charging documents outlining the allegations against them.
“What’s at issue is what happened after the person was arrested,” Chostner said Friday. “That is where the procedural due process started to fall apart.”
The ruling comes just over three months after a Denver Post investigation found Pueblo municipal judges routinely used contempt of court charges to inflate jail sentences for defendants facing low-level charges that carried little to no jail time.
The city’s judges used contempt of court to jail people for months in cases that in other Colorado courts are punished only by a fine, or by one or two days in jail, The Post found.
Friday’s ruling opens the door for other people still jailed on municipal contempt charges to challenge their convictions and sentences, said Ann Roan, an attorney not involved in the cases. She suggested Pueblo’s city attorney should proactively void those convictions.
“I would think any principled city attorney would move to vacate those sentences and free those people,” she said. “I can’t see any other reasonable course of action for a prosecutor.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado took legal action in October, moving for the immediate release of the three defendants — and this week, a fourth — on the grounds that their contempt of court convictions were invalid because they were never given charging documents.
Defendants are constitutionally entitled to charging documents in criminal cases so they can mount a defense. The Post this summer found no contempt citations or standalone contempt charging documents in more than 1,000 pages of Pueblo Municipal Court filings for 229 contempt charges across 37 different defendants.
Eric Ziporin, an attorney for Pueblo, argued Friday that charging documents were not required — because the contempt of court charges were not criminal charges.
In most courts across the state, contempt is not a crime in and of itself, but rather a special power granted to judges to allow them to enforce court orders and decorum. But in Pueblo, contempt of court is not only a judicial power but also codified in the city’s municipal laws as its own crime, punishable by up to 364 days in jail.
Ziporin argued Friday that the city’s judges used their judicial power of contempt to jail defendants, rather than charging contempt as a municipal crime under the city’s code. And that meant, he said, that the city was not required to provide defendants with charging documents.
“Contempt is not automatically a crime because a penalty has been attached to it,” he said. “That is simply a lazy analysis.”
Chostner rejected that argument, which was one of several Ziporin relied on to defend the municipal court’s practice. He also argued that defendants received full due process and the municipal judges followed correct procedures.
“I’m curious to hear how an offense that was used to impose consecutive jail sentences that were in some cases more than what you could receive in a county court case for a low-level felony, how that could not be criminal?” Chostner asked Ziporin, who replied that sentence lengths were not at issue.
When she ruled Friday, Chostner said the municipal court’s contempt of court practice also raised concern about separation of powers in the city’s court.
“The same judge initiated the prosecution, oversaw the proceedings and then would have been — had any petitioner decided to plead not guilty and request a trial — would have been one of the only, if not the only, witnesses,” she said.
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Roan, the outside attorney, noted that Pueblo City Attorney Carla Sikes, who imposed many of the contempt of court sentences in her prior job as the city’s presiding municipal court judge, now holds the power to vacate those sentences in the wake of Friday’s ruling.
She said Chostner’s decision was “the only just conclusion that there was.”
“Pueblo Municipal Court has been acting in complete derogation of individual rights,” Roan said.
Chostner last month ordered the immediate release of the three defendants while the overarching challenge was pending. She freed Dean Lopez, 55, who was sentenced to 575 days in jail for contempt of court, Lyrcis Martinez, 34, who was sentenced to 315 days, and Michael Tafoya 47, who was sentenced to 240 days.
Chostner on Friday also freed Christie Thorpe, 32, the subject of the ACLU’s latest petition. Thorpe was sentenced to 430 days in jail for contempt of court. Thorpe’s case was not decided with the other three Friday, and she is scheduled to appear for a hearing later this year.
Chostner said she plans to issue a written ruling in the coming weeks in addition to Friday’s ruling from the bench.
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