AURORA | Aurora attorneys this week requested more time to ask the Colorado Supreme Court to review its recent ruling against the city’s tough-on-crime shoplifting sentences.
The request comes from concerns about how the ruling could affect a variety of current city laws and possibly more, according to city officials.
“Aurora isn’t trying to overturn the decision,” City Attorney Pete Schulte said. “The ruling hasn’t been stayed, so that’s the law of the land. We’re going to follow the ruling until, or if it changes.”
Schulte said Aurora has so far only “filed for an extension just to give us more time to decide our next steps, if any.”
On Dec. 22 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in People v. Simons and People v. Camp cases that cities cannot give longer jail sentences for misdemeanor crimes than the state allows. The state allows requests for a rehearing within 14 days of a decision.
The ruling targeted several laws Aurora passed in recent years, all focused on increasing and mandating jail time for misdemeanor crimes like shoplifting, trespassing and leaving a restaurant without paying.
The state’s high court unanimously agreed that in Aurora, Denver and Westminster, city courts were wrongly required by local lawmakers to impose longer jail sentences than defendants would have received in a state court for the same conviction.
The lawsuit against Aurora came after Republicans overtook the city council majority in 2021 and began a campaign to increase jail-time and punishment for a variety of crimes, including car theft, car-parts theft, shoplifting and crimes linked to homelessness and vagrancy.
A recent analysis by the Sentinel of that jail-sentencing increase revealed that many crimes, including petty crimes, have measurably decreased since the midst of the pandemic in 2021, but crime rates in Aurora mirror those across the metro region, the state and the nation despite the harsher sentences.
The Dec. 22 ruling meant that Aurora would have to rectify jail-sentences imposed by local courts for hundreds of cases and reduce them to mirror state sentencing limits.
But this week, City Attorney Pete Schulte asked city lawmakers in a closed session meeting on Monday for permission to ask the high court for more time to consider a request for rehearing, Schulte told the Sentinel.
A rehearing is not an appeal, but it is generally an attempt to point out mistakes in a criminal or civil ruling or even new or overlooked information or evidence, according to litigation experts.
Schulte says that in this case, the city would want more detail and direction on how the ruling could affect Aurora’s current laws linked directly to the Dec. 22 ruling, but possibly other city laws as well, and even local zoning, land use and other regulations.
Westminster and Denver, also directly affected by the ruling, did not join the city in asking for more time to consider a rehearing motion. The Denver Post reported this week that Denver has begun revising its criminal sentences for misdemeanor assault cases, as directed by the high-court ruling.
Westminster officials were not immediately available to comment on the move by Aurora.
Schulte said his legal team is confused by the Dec. 22 ruling and wants clarity from the high court.
The state high court said that state legislators intended for sentencing rules to be the same statewide, even though the ruling never clearly said cities had to follow the state’s rules, Schulte said, and that worries the city about how to move forward.
“This Supreme Court decision has kind of thrown that upside down,” Schulte said. “So we’re trying to figure out what it means moving forward.”
Schulte said the clarity is critical.
“The big issue is,” he said, “how deep does it go? Is it just limited to the criminal justice system, or does it go to other areas of law, like land use?”
Schulte said the court relied on “intended preemption” for its ruling. That’s the idea that the state meant to override city laws even though it didn’t say so directly. That’s a shift from how Colorado courts usually decide whether an issue belongs to the state, local governments or both, Schulte said.
Now, Schulte said he’s worried that city lawyers will have to question every state law to see whether the Supreme Court might later decide that cities were never meant to regulate that area at all.
“Every statute now we’re going to have to consider whether there could be an intended preemption, even though it’s not explicit,” Schulte said.
In 2021, state legislators actually carved out exceptions that allowed municipal courts to keep some authority. But in this case, and a related case tied to the Simons case before the Supreme Court from Westminster, People v. Camp, the Supreme Court said lawmakers still wanted sentencing to be consistent across the state, limiting what cities can do.
City lawmakers said they were aware how hundreds of similar cases might be affected by the high-court ruling.
The city council’s Public Safety and Courts Committee and Civil Service commission were expected to take up issues linked the ruling to determine how to align municipal penalties with state penalties, Councilmember Alison Coombs said, adding that she was unable to comment further at the moment.
Chief Public Defender Elizabeth Cadiz said she is concerned about the news of a possible rehearing and how it could affect the timeline for the city to rectify the cases of her clients.