By Sam Tabachnik, Shelly Bradbury
The Denver Post
PUEBLO, Colo. — Pueblo officials freed the final inmates jailed solely on municipal contempt of court convictions last month after a district court judge ruled the city’s practice was unconstitutional.
City attorneys filed motions on Nov. 5 to vacate the municipal contempt of court convictions for six people, and five of those prisoners were released from jail, city spokeswoman Haley Robinson said Monday. The sixth person saw his jail sentence reduced by 130 days.
The move puts a bookend on a once-widespread practice in Pueblo Municipal Court in which city judges routinely used contempt of court charges to inflate sentences for defendants facing low-level charges that carried little to no jail time.
“This is what we wanted to do — we wanted to end this unconstitutional practice and it looks like the district court order has done that,” said Emma Mclean-Riggs , senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which had won the release of four initial prisoners and prompted the district judge’s Nov. 1 ruling that the city’s practice was unconstitutional.
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Robinson, in an email, said Pueblo municipal judges have not used contempt of court since June, shortly after a new presiding judge, Nelson Dunford , took over. There are no other individuals still in custody solely on municipal contempt charges, she said.
The Denver Post first revealed the city’s practice in July, finding Pueblo Municipal Court officials issued more than 1,700 contempt charges over an eight-month span between September and May. Across Colorado’s 12 most populous cities, no other city issued more than three dozen municipal contempt citations in that timeframe.
The city uniquely used contempt of court to jail people for months for offenses like loitering or minor theft that on their own would be punished with solely a fine or a few days in jail. On a single day in May, nearly one in five inmates at the Pueblo County jail was being held with municipal contempt charges or convictions, the newspaper found.
Under the municipal court’s former presiding judge, Carla Sikes, the Pueblo County jail routinely averaged 50 defendants in custody who were incarcerated solely on municipal charges, said Robinson, the city spokesperson.
The jail, under Dunford, now averages between 10 and 15 municipal-only defendants. On Friday, there were 13 people in custody on municipal charges, Robinson said. Dunford could not be reached for comment Monday.
Following The Post’s investigation, the ACLU of Colorado in October filed petitions alleging Pueblo’s contempt of court practice was unconstitutional because defendants never received charging documents outlining the basis for their contempt of court counts.
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.
During the Nov. 1 hearing, Pueblo District Judge Michelle Chostner sided with the ACLU, agreeing that the city’s practice was unconstitutional. She erased the sentences for four individuals who had been sentenced to hundreds of days in jail.
Mclean-Riggs on Friday said she was glad to see the city proactively moving to vacate the contempt convictions for other prisoners in light of the judge’s decision.
“We think that given the district court’s ruling, all of these convictions are plainly unconstitutional and the city attorney is doing the correct thing by moving to have them vacated, and the court is correct in vacating them,” Mclean-Riggs said. “We are just pleased to have been able to intervene in this situation and protect people from their violation of rights.”
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