Two bills proposed in the Colorado legislature seek to limit the sentencing power of municipal courts and prevent them from imposing harsher punishments than state courts for the same crimes.
Colorado lawmakers are set to introduce a pair of bills in the next legislative session that would bar municipal courts from imposing more severe sentences than state courts for the same crimes, as well as limit city courts from criminalizing missed hearings. The first bill, sponsored by Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat, seeks to address disparities in sentences between state courts and their lower-level municipal counterparts.
Legislative reforms in 2021 significantly reduced maximum penalties for a host of low-level, nonviolent crimes in Colorado’s state courts. But municipal courts, which operate individually and are not part of the state judicial system, were not included in the statute. The proposed legislation would not allow cities to punish people beyond the maximum sentence outlined in state statute for the same crime. For example, Colorado city ordinances allow for a maximum punishment of 364 days in jail — even for crimes like petty theft or trespassing. At the state level, those offenses can only be punishable with up to 10 days in jail. Cities, under the proposed bill, would be forced to stay under that 10-day number. If there’s no comparable state-level offense, the maximum sentence for city offenses would default to the state-level petty offense criteria: up to 10 days in jail or a fine of up to $300 or both. The legislation comes as some cities, like Aurora and Pueblo, have beefed up their local ordinances in response to the state reforms, passing mandatory-minimum jail requirements for certain low-level, non-violent offenses that carry little to no jail time in state courts.of 468 theft and trespassing convictions across 10 of Colorado’s largest cities found defendants on average served five times more jail time in municipal court than state court — but that the difference was just a matter of days. Overall, people spent little time in jail after their convictions on those crimes across both municipal and state court
SENTENCING DISPARITIES MUNICIPAL COURTS STATE COURTS CRIMINAL JUSTICE COLORADO LEGISLATURE
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