Pueblo’s city attorney this week defended the city’s use of contempt charges to extend jail sentences for municipal court defendants in her first public comments since a Denver Post investigation found the practice was unprecedented in Colorado’s major cities and likely unconstitutional.
Carla Sikes, who served as the presiding judge of Pueblo Municipal Court for eight years before becoming Pueblo’s city attorney in March, defended the municipal court’s practice as fair, necessary and limited in scope during a City Council work session Monday.
“I don’t care how frustrated I got, I would never do anything that was illegal, knowingly illegal,” she said. “We had the contempt charge that was on the books, we used every tool available to encourage resolution of the cases, and that was one of the tools we used.”
The Post’s investigation, published in July, found that Sikes and other judges in Pueblo Municipal Court routinely used contempt of court charges to inflate sentences for defendants who otherwise faced little to no jail time on low-level underlying charges like loitering or trespassing.
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. Pueblo issued 1,700 contempt charges in an eight month span; no other major Colorado city issued more than three dozen in that time frame.
