How Pueblo weaponizes contempt of court to inflate jail time for minor crimes (2024)

PUEBLO — By the time Gilbert Thomas appeared in Pueblo Municipal Court, he’d lost control of his life.

The 37-year-old lived on the streets, addicted to drugs and broke. He faced dozens of city charges that stemmed from being unhoused.

Loitering. Curfew violations for sleeping in city parks. Trespassing. Possessing drug paraphernalia. Resisting arrest. Interfering with police. Thefts from stores. Missed court hearings.

“I didn’t hurt nobody,” Thomas said. “I didn’t break no windows. I didn’t damage no property.”

Thomas needed help. He got jail — and lots of it.

Only two of the municipal offenses Thomas faced can typically be punished with jail time under Pueblo’s city code — the others carry only fines. But a Pueblo Municipal Court judge in September sentenced Thomas to 660 days in jail, extending his sentence on the underlying charges by 32% — a full seven months — through an unusual legal avenue that Pueblo’s city officials have uniquely wielded to punish defendants who miss court appearances: contempt of court.

Pueblo’s municipal court judges regularly used contempt charges to inflate sentences for defendants who otherwise faced little to no jail time on minor city offenses like loitering, trespassing and shoplifting, a Denver Post investigation found. Pueblo city judges sent people to jail for months on charges that in other Colorado courts are punished by one or two days in jail, if that, experts said.

Pueblo’s standard policy has been to bring contempt of court charges — both a judicial power and, in Pueblo, a city crime — each time a defendant fails to attend a court hearing. Those contempt charges each carry up to a year in jail and a fine. In Pueblo, they’ve often been stacked on top of each other, leading to soaring jail sentences and thousands of dollars in fines.

The practice is unprecedented in Colorado’s major cities and likely unconstitutional, experts told The Post.

“What is happening should shock all of us as residents of Colorado,” said Emma Mclean-Riggs, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “These are draconian punishments for missing court dates.”

One man who faced 10 loitering, trespassing and failure to appear charges was sentenced in February to 169 days on the underlying charges, plus 330 days in jail on 16 contempt counts — a 16-month sentence, with 66% of it due to contempt of court.

Another man with dozens of the same three charges was sentenced in December to more than 18 months in jail, with 130 days on contempt convictions alone. A woman cited for the unlawful sale of tobacco was sentenced in May to 45 days in jail — entirely for contempt of court.

Pueblo Municipal Court officials issued more than 1,700 contempt charges over an eight-month span between September and May, The Post found. Across Colorado’s 12 most populous cities, no other city issued more than three dozen municipal contempt citations in that timeframe. The longest sentence in any contempt case among those cities: 30 days in jail.

The Post found Pueblo routinely slapped contempt charges on unhoused individuals and those in the throes of addiction. The practice costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in incarceration costs. On a single day in late May, nearly one in five inmates at the Pueblo County jail was being held with municipal contempt charges or convictions, The Post found.

Ten attorneys and municipal court experts who reviewed The Post’s findings expressed alarm at the length of Pueblo Municipal Court’s contempt of court sentences on cases that involved only low-level, non-violent offenses.

All said they had never seen contempt of court used in this manner.

“It doesn’t fit into any courtroom practice anywhere, except Moscow,” Denver defense attorney Doug Richards said. “That is outrageous.”

The Post’s four-month investigation included interviews with nearly two dozen people, including inmates, attorneys, judges and civil rights experts. The newspaper also reviewed more than a thousand pages of court documents as well as municipal court audio recordings.

In Thomas’ case, judges levied at least seven contempt of court charges against him for a single missed court date, then sentenced him consecutively on each charge, a practice multiple attorneys argued violated his constitutional rights.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to exceed the law just because you have a gavel and a gown,” Thomas said in an interview at his home.

Pueblo city officials declined interview requests with the current presiding municipal judge, Nelson Dunford, as well as the previous chief judge, Carla Sikes, who now works as the Pueblo city attorney. The city also did not answer a list of emailed questions from The Post.

In a statement, Pueblo officials said the municipal court provides options for people to resolve their cases through community service or treatment. Defendants, though, do not always take advantage of these options, spokesperson Haley Robinson said.

“Pueblo Municipal Court holds defendants accountable in these instances, sometimes employing its contempt power,” she said. “All defendants are provided due process.”

“Unusual and unjust”

Thomas has always enjoyed working with cars. He likes getting his hands dirty and fixing problems.

He even took courses at Pueblo Community College, training to become an automotive mechanic.

But drugs kept getting in the way.

Heroin. Crystal meth. Fentanyl.

“It was tearing my life down,” he said. “I ignored people and didn’t want to change.”

With addiction came arrests: His lengthy criminal record dates back to 2005 and includes charges of fraud, harassment and felony menacing. By 2022, he was living on the streets and picking up petty offenses for curfew violations and theft.

He was initially sentenced to probation on the municipal charges, but wasn’t able to meet the conditions. He kept missing court hearings, a pattern experts say is not uncommon for unhoused individuals using substances.

Each time he failed to appear, Sikes, then the Pueblo Municipal Court presiding judge, brought multiple counts of contempt of court against him — part of a regular practice within the city court to punish people who miss court hearings with new charges.

“That practice alone is unusual and unjust,” Mclean-Riggs said. “…This is a highly unusual use of contempt.”

In other courts, judges typically issue a warrant for the arrest of defendants who miss court appearances, and those defendants are then jailed until their next court appearance to ensure they attend. In those scenarios, the failure to appear charges are remedial, not punitive, and usually do not carry their own jail sentences.

But in Pueblo, those missed court dates led to contempt charges which led to extensive jail time. Records reviewed by The Post show municipal defendants in Pueblo have received as many as 675 days in jail on minor charges. Others have seen 400-plus-day sentences.

“It’s horrifying,” said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. “It’s a misuse of the criminal legal system on a profound level… What an abuse, and for people who are not actually criminals. That’s not their problem. To force them into a jail setting — what happens at the end of those 500, 600 days is they get released homeless. So what has been accomplished?”

Sikes sometimes meted out longer sentences on contempt convictions than defendants routinely receive for low-level felonies in district court. She served as the presiding judge of Pueblo Municipal Court for eight years before becoming Pueblo’s interim city attorney in March.

“The punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” said Colette Tvedt, a Denver municipal public defender.

In cities across the state, many municipal offenses — such as loitering, trespassing and traffic tickets — typically don’t carry any jail time. In Pueblo, Class 1 violations, including battery, menacing and contempt of court, carry up to a year in jail and $1,000 in fines. Class 2 violations, such as littering and minor theft, are typically punished only with fines.

Municipal courts can’t sentence someone to longer than a year in jail on a single count. But judges in Pueblo stacked sentences consecutively to jail defendants for longer than one year.

“When you’re talking about 200-day sentences for simple failures to appear for low-level offenses, my level of concern is extreme,” said Rebecca Wallace, policy director at the Colorado Freedom Fund, a revolving community bond fund that pays bail for people who cannot afford it.

“Everyone is in here on municipal”

When Markus Valdez was homeless and using methamphetamine and fentanyl, he stole some clothes from a Ross Dress For Less, ran from the cops and panhandled at the McDonald’s on the north side of town. He threw a can of vegetables at a security guard who woke him from sleeping on a bench.

And when the homeless shelter filled up and it was too cold to sleep outside, the 22-year-old would break into rooms at a now-shuttered hotel.

He faced municipal charges for each of those actions: loitering, trespassing, theft from a merchant, resisting arrest, menacing, destruction of property, throwing missiles. And then he missed court and picked up six failures to appear and 11 contempt of court charges, records show.

“I was homeless and I was on drugs, and it was hard for me to get around even if I wanted to,” Valdez said in an interview from jail. “Anytime I’d get a court date, my papers would get lost or my phone would get stolen.”

Rather than intentional acts, research suggests most people who miss their court dates are not fugitives of justice running from the law. They might need to be at work, lack child care or misunderstand the court system.

Those living on the street might not have a phone or computer. They’re often battling substance-use issues or mental health struggles.

“Municipal court for low-level offenses is one of the least challenging aspects these people are facing on any given day,” Wallace said.

In January, the Pueblo City Attorney’s Office offered Valdez 450 days in jail — with 110 days on the contempt charges alone — if he pleaded guilty to all counts, he said. At first, he wanted to fight it.

“My public defender talked me into, ‘Oh well, it’s best to take it now. If not, it’s not worth it. Take the plea and sit here and get it done,’” he said. “Rather than fighting it, and being in here for so many months, and then having to do extra days.”

On May 29, Valdez was one of 85 people being held in the Pueblo County jail with municipal contempt of court charges or convictions on their booking records. On that day, roughly 18% of inmates in the jail — 85 of 469 — had such counts, The Post found. Sixty-five percent of those 85 inmates were people of color.

“I’m in a 75-man unit and there are about 20 people in here for outrageously long sentences on contempts,” said Brian Moreno, 40, who in February was sentenced to 360 days in jail with 96 days on contempt charges alone.

“Everyone is in here on municipal,” said then-inmate Savana Lopez, 34, who was also sentenced for contempt. “There are a lot of us in here on petty (expletive).”

No evidence of show-cause hearings, citations

Municipal courts are the lowest-level courts in Colorado, and handle city code violations like traffic offenses, shoplifting, disturbances and some domestic violence cases. District and county courts handle violations of state law. The state’s more than 215 municipal courts operate independently of each other and are not part of the Colorado Judicial Department, which oversees state courts.

In most courts across the state, contempt of court is a special power granted to judges to allow them to enforce court orders and decorum. Contempt of court is generally used in two ways: Direct contempt involves an act that is seen or heard by the judge in their courtroom, such as a defendant threatening an officer of the court. Indirect contempt occurs outside a judge’s view, like jury tampering.

In direct contempt cases, judges can make a finding of contempt and then immediately punish the offender with a fine or, typically, no more than six months in jail. In indirect contempt cases, additional safeguards are spelled out in state law, including that defendants must be served with a citation, advised of several rights, summoned to a show-cause hearing and given the opportunity to defend themselves.

In Pueblo, contempt of court is not only a judicial power but also codified in the city’s municipal laws as its own crime, which is typically charged and prosecuted by the city attorney.

But when handling contempt of court, Pueblo city officials appeared to follow neither the regular procedure for judicial contempt nor the regular procedure for prosecuting a crime — instead relying on a mishmash of the two procedures in which judges charged the contempt of court counts and the city attorney’s office prosecuted them. That left defendants unprotected, the ACLU’s Mclean-Riggs said.

“I cannot emphasize enough how minor these offenses are, how major these penalties are, and how thin the constitutional protections that are being offered are,” she said.

The Post found no evidence that Pueblo’s city judges held show-cause hearings and found no contempt citations or standalone contempt charging documents in more than 1,000 pages of reviewed court filings for 229 contempt charges across 37 different defendants, at least 60% of whom were unhoused.

“In state court, if someone files contempt, I’m going to get an affidavit to support those allegations,” said Morgan deHaro-Brown, a defense attorney who practices in Pueblo Municipal Court. “Here, you just have all these contempts, but there’s no paperwork.”

The Post originally sought basic sentencing information about all 1,743 contempt of court charges filed by the court between September and May, but narrowed the scope of that review after Pueblo city officials sought to charge the newspaper $13,000 for a list of affected defendants and their case dispositions, sentences and judges.

The ACLU of Colorado, which has also been investigating Pueblo’s use of contempt, found the city’s laws do not provide for defendants facing contempt to have a jury trial — instead allowing for a hearing before the municipal court judge, Mclean-Riggs said.

Under Colorado law, the right to trial by jury is guaranteed in all criminal cases.

“That is a transparent violation of their constitutional rights,” she said.

Thirty-one contempt charges

By the time Thomas was arrested againand brought to court in August 2023, he faced 66 municipal charges across 15 cases, including 31 contempt of court charges.

Under Pueblo’s sentencing practices, Thomas could have faced more than three decades in jail if convicted on every contempt charge and sentenced consecutively to the maximum possible jail time.

So he took a deal.

Thomas pleaded no contest to 66 offenses, including all 31 contempt of court charges. He was sentenced to 660 days in jail, with 210 days on seven contempt charges and 450 days on five other charges. The remaining counts were sentenced concurrently or carried no jail time. Each contempt also cost Thomas $100 or $200 in fines.

His total bill: $16,355 — though all fines were converted to jail time.

Thomas’ plea agreement did not state how much jail time the fines created, though city laws typically count a day in jail as $40 toward a defendant’s fines. The fines converted to jail appeared to be served concurrently in Thomas’ case, though that also wasn’t specified in his court records.

Both Colorado law and the U.S. Constitution hold that people can’t be jailed solely because they are too poor to pay a fine.

Pueblo’s city laws only allow judges to jail defendants who have the financial means to pay a fine but refuse to. But The Post found multiple cases in which fines were converted to jail time for defendants who, like Thomas, were homeless and indigent.

“The more you dig into these practices, the more clear it becomes that there are very, very systemic, widespread violations of people’s constitutional rights in this court, in many different areas,” Mclean-Riggs said.

“Something isn’t right”

With an average daily population of 500, it costs the Pueblo jail about $147 each day to house one inmate, according to the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office.

A 450-day stay — Valdez’s sentence — would cost roughly $66,150.

In some ways, being in jail has been helpful, Valdez said. He’s gotten sober — a process he had started before his arrest — and has disconnected from the people who acted as bad influences on his life, he said. But all that happened during his first three months behind bars.

“I’m not the type to try to make an excuse for anything I did,” he said. “…But at the same time, I’m not a horrible guy, you know? I haven’t caught no other charges than these for years, you know? So I’ve stayed out of trouble. For me to have no previous offending cases, it’s just a lot of (jail) time. They could have definitely given me a chance at probation.”

When he pleaded guilty, he signed paperwork — including a half-page “Advisem*nt of Rights” — in a room away from the judge, whom he never saw. Then he was loaded onto a van and driven straight to the jail, he said.

Judges at all levels of court — municipal, county and district courts — must ensure defendants understand all of their rights when pleading guilty. In district courts, judges typically do so by directly asking defendants a long series of questions about everything from their education and English language proficiency to their relationship with their attorney and current mental state.

But in municipal courts, judges are allowed to accept written guilty pleas in all cases without the defendant being present, according to Colorado Municipal Court Rules of Procedure.

“The loss of that safeguard is particularly dangerous in this context,” Mclean-Riggs said, noting that Pueblo’s approach to contempt is “so muddled” that it’s especially important for judges to be sure defendants understand the rights they’re giving up when they plead guilty.

Valdez and Moreno both said their attorneys told them when they pleaded that they could write the judge to request a reconsideration of their sentences. Both tried to do so, unsuccessfully, they said.

Thomas also fought his sentence after pleading guilty. From jail, he repeatedly asked Sikes for an early release.

He had family support on the outside, he said, and completed his GED. He had a potential job lined up at a bowling alley and remained part of a local ironworkers’ union. Thomas told the judge he was sober and looking at in-patient rehab facilities.

“I have a plan, but I’m sitting here on dead time doing nothing,” he told Sikes in a letter. “Something isn’t right.”

Sikes denied his pleas repeatedly, though she pledged during a Jan. 8 hearing to release him if he could get a bed at a substance abuse treatment facility.

That’s no easy task in Colorado.

The state has a 60% treatment gap — meaning 6 out of 10 people seeking treatment cannot get it. Experts say it’s even harder for those who are unhoused or in carceral settings.

“It is an endemic problem with our system,” said Robert Valuck, executive director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. “We don’t have enough treatment available for people.”

In the January hearing, Pueblo Assistant City Attorney Jason Bachlet argued that releasing Thomas from jail without a clear path to treatment would do more harm than good, and could land Thomas back in court on new crimes in the future.

“If we had a bed date, this might be a different game,” he said.

But jails are not neutral, safe environments for people to wait for treatment, or even to receive it, said Donner of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. And not everyone requires residential treatment for addiction, she added.

“There’s substantial negative impacts from the experience of being incarcerated, whether it’s the strip search you go through and all of the chaos you are dealing with, or the fact you probably won’t have access to care,” she said. “You lose your liberty, your choice, and then you get released without the services and support you need. Incarceration is highly traumatizing for the people who experience it.”

Challenging Thomas’ sentence

Thomas was still in jail two months later, on March 15, when his case came before a new judge who balked at the length of his sentence, according to an audio recording obtained by The Post through an open records request.

“Am I seeing this correctly — 660 days?” visiting Judge Stephen Jonesasked, presiding over the case for the first time after it was handled by two other judges. The sentence may be illegal, he told the attorneys. “We’re going to have to do something to try and truncate this,” he said.

In subsequent court filings, Thomas’ attorney, Keri Williams, argued his sentence was illegal because eight of the contempt of court charges against him stemmed from one missed court proceeding.

He failed to appear in court on Jan. 10, when he was still in jail. He told The Post deputies didn’t bring him to court for the hearing.

As a result of that one missed proceeding, Thomas received one contempt of court charge for each of his eight underlying charges, Williams wrote. He was later sentenced to 30 days in jail on each contempt conviction, with the sentences stacked on top of one another consecutively.

Williams argued in court filings that each of those punishments were for the same crime, and it was unconstitutional for the jail time to run back-to-back. She proposed Thomas serve the sentences concurrently instead of consecutively.

Bachlet, the assistant city attorney, argued in court filings that each of the contempt charges in Thomas’ case were valid because Thomas failed to obey court orders involving 15 distinct underlying cases.

“While the failure to appear in each case occurred at the same time, that is simply a matter of scheduling,” he wrote. “…The court could have set the matters on the same day every half hour or on consecutive days or even one minute apart. The fact that they were set at the same time does not suddenly convert all the failures to appear into one act.”

In the January hearing, Bachlet described cracking down on “pervasive” thefts from stores, one of Thomas’ charges, as a priority for the city of Pueblo.

“Decisions have consequences,” Bachlet said in a February hearing. “The community is suffering based on his behavior.”

Shortly after Jones set a hearing to review Thomas’ sentence, Jones said he was told by Pueblo Mayor Heather Graham and city attorney Sikes that his employment contract was not being renewed. Graham, through a city spokesperson, declined to comment.

Thomas’ sentence stood.

Unprecedented use of contempt

No other major Colorado city uses contempt of court the way Pueblo does, The Post found.

Pueblo municipal court judges issued 1,743 contempt charges across all cases between Sept. 1 and May 5, vastly more than any other Colorado city with a population of more than 100,000 residents.

Municipal judges issued zero contempt of court citations or charges in Arvada, Boulder, Broomfield, Colorado Springs, Centennial, Greeley, Fort Collins and Lakewood during that eight-month span, even though contempt of court is codified as a municipal crime in at least three of those cities, like it is in Pueblo.

Thornton and Westminster, cities with slightly more people than Pueblo, each saw three contempt of court citations in a similar time frame.

In Aurora, judges issued 12 contempt citations. The maximum sentence imposed was 30 days jail, with a median sentence of three days in jail among the nine cases that had been sentenced, data provided by the court showed. In Denver, contempt of court was discussed in about 27 criminal cases, and at least five citations were issued.

In smaller Wheat Ridge, which has a population of just over 30,000 residents, municipal judges issued 29 contempt citations between September and May. Twelve were dismissed, and the maximum sentence was 15 days in jail, according to court data.

Each municipal court follows its city’s local ordinances, often with little-to-no supervision, experts say.

“They are just far enough off the beaten path that they sort of get away with making up their own rules,” said Richards, the Denver defense attorney. “It certainly reeks of that here.”

The ACLU of Colorado has repeatedly raised alarm about what it calls “abusive practices” in city courts that can go unchecked for years due to lack of oversight. In 2014, the civil rights organization accused Colorado Springs Municipal Court of running a debtor’s prison by jailing hundreds of people who couldn’t pay $50 fines.

And in 2017, the ACLU published an in-depth investigation into Alamosa Municipal Court, where a single judge issued arrest warrants at nearly twice the rate of other municipal courts, jailing people on unusually high bonds and levying unusually high fines.

The report at the time said the entire municipal court system was “in dire need of reform.”

Wallace said she’s seen a recent uptick in heavy-handed punishments in some Colorado municipal courts.

“(We’re) seeing a resurgence in cowboy court practices,” she said. “Judges meting out sentences that would be unthinkable at the state level… They can skirt so many different laws by criminalizing failure to appear.”

In May, Pueblo’s mayor appointed Dunford to be Sikes’ successor as the municipal court’s presiding judge.

Since The Post began reporting this story in April, attorneys who practice in Pueblo say the city court’s practices have started to change.

Dunford stopped issuing contempt charges for failure to appear, they say. Instead, an arrest warrant is issued — a practice that conforms with other Colorado courts. Dunford, the attorneys say, has also ceased sentencing people consecutively for the same violation.

“He’s good at recognizing that is illegal,” Williams, the Pueblo defense attorney, said.“He’s seeing the light.”

Law-abiding citizen

Ultimately, Thomas served 261 days — nearly 10 months — before being released in May into Crossroads Turning Points, a drug and alcohol treatment facility.

He took home a thick white binder packed with information about anger management and the 12-step program. The spine reads, “Honor, love, change.”

Thomas in June said he’s been sober for nine months and doesn’t plan on ruining his streak. When he gets triggered, he takes suboxone, a medication to treat opioid-use disorder.

“My intentions are pure,” he said in an interview. “I’m a little afraid, but I’m walking with God.”

He’s spent his days running the track at nearby Centennial High School and taking long walks by the Arkansas River. He’s lifting weights — benching up to 315 pounds — and watching movies.

His favorite: “Law Abiding Citizen.”

“I feel like I could be part of life again,” Thomas said.

A Bible sits on his pillow in his bedroom. He takes comfort in Psalms 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Thomas said he knows he needed some jail time to put him on the straight and narrow.

“But not as much as they gave me,” he said.

He thinks about the slogan at the Pueblo courthouse: Service over self.

“That emblem didn’t mean nothing.”

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Originally Published: July 21, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.