Updated on Friday, Dec. 13, 2024, at 3:46 p.m.
The City of Pueblo has stopped a controversial practice of handing down inflated jail sentences for missing court dates for minor offenses. A district judge ruled the practice was unconstitutional in November.
The ACLU of Colorado sued over the city’s policy in October. Senior Staff Attorney Emma Mclean-Riggs said a city ordinance passed in 2017 created a separate free-standing crime for a failure to appear, placing it under the municipal court’s contempt of court offenses. According to Mclean-Riggs, minor offenders — such as those being ticketed for standing in a median — would be given long jail sentences — sometimes hundreds of days — if they missed their court date.
“We were seeing these very, very aggressive, egregious sentences,” Mclean-Riggs said. “We are unaware of any other Colorado city that punishes contempt in this way.”
A Denver Post investigation published this summer found Pueblo issued more than 1,700 contempt of court charges over an eight-month period from Sept. 2023 through May 2024. Among Colorado’s 12 most populous cities, no other city issued more than three dozen contempt charges and the longest sentence outside of Pueblo was 30 days in jail. Most commonly, a failure to appear for a court date is instead penalized with a higher bond amount or an arrest and detainment until that person’s hearing can be conducted.
“This practice was deployed primarily against the most marginalized members of the community … folks who were unhoused, folks who were mentally ill, folks who were struggling with addiction,” Mclean-Riggs said. “The folks who are likely to miss court are folks who have chaotic, dangerous lives, who need to focus on their survival and who really struggle to make these court appointments.”
Sentence length for these contempt charges was not the issue at the core of the ACLU’s lawsuit, however. Rather, the lawsuit pointed out that the city filed no charging documents in these cases. Pueblo County district court ruled that practice unconstitutional in November, vacating the sentences of the lawsuit’s four plaintiffs.
In an email, Pueblo’s Public Affairs Director Haley Sue Robinson said the city stopped issuing the sentences in June and that there are no longer individuals still in custody on the municipal contempt of court charges.
“There is no court so high as to be above the law, there is no court so low as to be above the law. Just because these are courts that adjudicate low-level charges … that doesn’t mean they’re not bound by the constitution,” Mclean-Riggs said.
Editor's note: This article has been updated with a statement from the City of Pueblo.
