DENVER — 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.

Attorneys and municipal court experts who reviewed The Post’s findings expressed alarm at the length of the jail sentences in city cases that involved low-level, non-violent offenses.

Sikes at the time declined to speak with The Post.

On Monday, she told City Council members that the city’s use of contempt of court was connected to jail overcrowding that started around 2016 or 2017 and continued through 2022.

She said the jail “no longer took municipal inmates” and that people facing charges in Pueblo Municipal Court would be booked into jail and quickly released on the condition they return to court when scheduled.

“As a result of all this, our failures to appear began to skyrocket,” Sikes said, referring to people who did not show up to their court appearances.

In an effort to curtail that, the municipal court and the jail agreed that defendants with three or more contempt of court charges would be held in custody, she said, later saying they would be held for 48 hours until they were arraigned and issued a bond.

“We came up with an agreement with the jail that they would hold people after they had multiple contempt charges,” she said.

Gayle Perez, spokeswoman for the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, said Tuesday that “there is no mention for special holds for contempt charges” in the most recent agreement between the two agencies.

She said the jail has a 10-bed cap for defendants who are being held pretrial solely on municipal charges and for defendants who have been sentenced on municipal court charges but are not working inside the jail. There is no cap for people sentenced to jail solely on municipal crimes who are working jobs within the jail while serving their sentence, Perez said.

As far as the long jail sentences highlighted by The Post — one man was sentenced to 660 days in jail with 210 days on contempt of court charges alone — Sikes said most people did not face such sentences.

“I wanted to point out that the individuals that received the lengthier jail sentences really are a smaller portion of the overall population of people that come through municipal court,” she said. “For the majority of people who came through municipal court, this process worked, because by the time most people got a single contempt or even a second contempt, they complied, they got everything done, their case was closed. The people who got those lengthier sentences are those people who really refused to participate, refused to show up to court, refused to do any community service, any kind of treatment.”

She was not able to answer a council member’s question about how many people municipal court judges have charged with contempt of court, but said she doubted The Post’s reporting that on a single day in May, nearly one in five inmates in the Pueblo County jail were held with contempt of court charges or convictions on their booking records — 85 of 469 inmates.

“I’m not sure where they got that number,” she said, noting that inmates who have municipal contempt of court charges might also be held on different state charges or other violations.

The Post identify the 85 people in the Pueblo County jail who had municipal contempt of court charges or convictions on their booking records by individually reviewing the jail booking records for each of the 469 inmates jailed on May 29.

Sikes noted that all of the defendants mentioned in The Post’s investigation entered into plea agreements in which they agreed to their sentences, and said her goal on the bench was always to get defendants connected to treatment, but it was often difficult to find available treatment options.

Citing The Post’s reporting, Councilman Roger Gomez asked Sikes whether she was “comfortable feeling (that) what you did was not an abuse on your end.”

“I can tell you that I reviewed it as the judge,” she said. “We had defense counsel, we had prosecuting attorneys, and this was never raised as an issue by any of them.”

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