Aurora lawmakers advance shifting domestic violence court cases despite county warnings

AURORA | A proposal to drop Aurora’s domestic violence caseload on county prosecutors earned early support from conservatives Thursday, despite warnings that doing so could delay justice for victims.

Aurora City Council member and mayor pro tem Dustin Zvonek has said the proposal to move domestic violence cases out of municipal court and into county court is in response to a state bill that would prohibit cities that handle those cases from signing flat-fee contracts for public defender services.

On May 9, Zvonek primarily described the shift as a way to save money that would otherwise be spent prosecuting, adjudicating and providing public defenders in those cases, while also leaving the door open for exploring the future privatization of the Aurora Public Defender Office.

“The Legislature is trying to hamstring local governments and our ability to control costs,” he told members of the council’s public safety policy committee. “Our city has a ton of priorities that our taxpayers expect us to address.”

While the vast majority of cities in Colorado rely on county courts to prosecute domestic violence, Aurora started handling those cases in its municipal court in the 1980s, as city leaders grew concerned about counties not making them a priority.

According to Zvonek, the city’s domestic violence caseload costs it upward of $3 million each year, which he referred to as a “subsidy” in light of where most cities send their cases.

His proposal has so far earned a chilly reception from Arapahoe and Adams counties, who say they lack the resources to handle the volume of domestic violence incidents that end up in Aurora’s municipal court each year — about 1,600 at the time of a 2021 report on the city’s public defense system.

Arapahoe County spokesman Anders Nelson previously said a 2023 analysis indicated 1,588 cases could be added to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office’s caseload annually if municipal prosecutions were to cease, which is three times what it handles currently.

The county estimates the cost of absorbing those cases would be $2.45 million to staff up in the courthouse and prosecutor’s office. That also doesn’t factor in the cost of setting up more courtroom space.

Nelson said that, without additional funding by 2025, the county wouldn’t be able to keep up with those cases while providing other essential services.

When asked whether the county expects fewer perpetrators would be prosecuted as a result, Nelson said cases would more likely stack up and take longer to move through the legal process.

“The timelines would get pushed back, because you can only do as much as you have room for,” he said. “So, I think it’s not necessarily that they would fall through the cracks, but the timeliness would be impacted.”

The 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office has said it is continuing to analyze the potential impacts of the proposal but that accepting all domestic violence cases that take place in the northern part of Aurora overlapped by Adams County “would drastically increase our caseload and would require immediate additional resources.”

Karmen Carter — the executive director of Gateway Domestic Violence Services, an Aurora agency that offers aid and shelter to victims of domestic violence — said she, too, was worried about the inability of county courts to pick up the slack if the city halts prosecutions.

“I just think less cases will get heard because there’s less resources at the county level,” she said. “I’m concerned about victims getting lost in this process.”

Carter said she had not been contacted about the proposal prior to the Sentinel contacting her Wednesday, at which point she reached out to Zvonek. The lawmaker said after the May 9 meeting that he is open to working with Gateway and other entities responding to domestic violence.

“If we do it, the way that we roll it out and phase ourselves out is going to be important, and I’m open to bringing all of the stakeholders in,” he said. 

Nelson said talks between the city and Arapahoe County are ongoing.

As for whether Zvonek would support the city dropping prosecutions even if other jurisdictions are unable to absorb Aurora’s domestic violence caseload, he said he believed this was unlikely to happen, but that it would ultimately be up to counties to accommodate the city’s decision.

“It’s a question of whether or not they’re going to prioritize prosecuting domestic violence cases, and they do in every other city,” he said.

“They probably don’t have the resources, but that’s on the counties to figure out.”

A state mandate is the impetus

The bill that inspired Zvonek’s proposal — House Bill 24-1437, whose sponsors include Rep. Mike Weissman and Sen. Rhonda Fields of Aurora — passed the Colorado Senate in the final days of the 2024 legislative session. Gov. Jared Polis has until early June to sign it into law.

Starting July 1, 2025, cities that handle domestic violence in their municipal courts would be barred from paying attorneys to represent indigent clients on the basis of a contract that does not account for the time and effort spent on individual cases.

It’s not Weissman’s first bill focusing on cities that choose to prosecute domestic violence. Last year, another of Weissman’s bills would have ended the municipal prosecution of domestic violence completely. The bill was amended to continue to allow prosecutions while requiring that cities comply with the notification requirements of the Victim Rights Act.

Zvonek was a member of a council policy committee tasked with taking positions on pending state and federal legislation at the time. He opposed the original version of the 2023 bill along with council members Angela Lawson and Danielle Jurinsky, and he supported the amended version that did not end local prosecutions.

The city’s intergovernmental relations manager, Liz Rogers, wrote in a document presented to committee members at the time that “domestic violence cases filed in a municipal court are precursors to more violent incidents that can include strangulation and death” and that “limiting the prosecution of these crimes puts victims in greater danger.”

Rogers also pointed out that keeping cases local spares victims the hardship of traveling to county courthouses in Centennial and Brighton for hearings. City spokesman Michael Brannen on Thursday said Roger’s statement compiled feedback given by the Aurora Police Department, City Attorney’s Office and Municipal Court.

Zvonek said his concerns about the cost of prosecuting and defending domestic violence cases have deepened since he took positions on last year’s bill. He brought up how the majority of the caseload of city public defenders consists of domestic violence cases and said he was aware of this fact when he sponsored the RFP last year.

He also expressed doubt that moving prosecutions from one venue to another would harm victims, saying district attorneys are successfully prosecuting domestic violence now and will continue to do so even if the city hands off its current caseload.

“This isn’t some novel idea; this is the way it works,” Zvonek said.

Zvonek’s proposal follows several months of sparring over the future of the office. In October, Zvonek sponsored a request for proposals, or RFP, for private law firms to take over the work of public defense. Law firms were invited to submit bids for two months starting in January, but a March deadline came and went with no bids received.

Throughout the process, Zvonek and other conservatives framed the RFP as the mechanism by which the council would decide whether to continue exploring privatization.

Zvonek said on multiple occasions that the RFP would be the extent of the council and city’s investment of time if no cost savings were identified, commenting in October that if the RFP failed to turn up a lower bid, the effort “wouldn’t move forward in any way.”

Supporters also dismissed the accusation by defense attorneys and progressives that council conservatives were trying to manufacture a reason to abolish the office in retaliation for former chief public defender Doug Wilson’s public opposition to mandatory minimum jail sentences for various crimes.

Shortly after the end of the RFP, Zvonek said he viewed the outcome as the end of the council’s inquiry into privatization.

Despite these and other statements, in late March, Jurinsky said at a meeting of the same committee that opposed the original version of Weissman’s 2023 bill that the council was “not going to back off” from hiring private attorneys to do the work of public defenders.

She also described the new bill as “an attempt to stop us from trying another RFP or continuing our efforts to get rid of our in-house public defender’s office” in the context of the proposal brought by Zvonek.

Jurinsky later disputed that she had said the council was continuing to explore privatization.

At the May 9 committee meeting, she framed her support for transferring prosecutions in terms of saving taxpayer money on a crime that the vast majority of Colorado cities trust counties to prosecute.

“I don’t really think this is up for conversation,” Jurinsky said. “I support this wholeheartedly. Regardless of where the legislation goes — I don’t care what happens with the legislation — I think this is exactly what should happen anyways.”

Also during the May 9 meeting, Zvonek presented an item that would eliminate a sunset clause for the mandatory minimum jail sentences applying to motor vehicle theft and failure to appear in court, continuing those policies indefinitely.

Interim police chief Heather Morris cited falling rates of vehicle theft as one reason to continue the tougher sentences, though the trend in Aurora has followed statewide drops in crime.

City spokesman Ryan Luby said Wednesday that the city would not have any data to release about the cost of the mandatory minimum sentencing policies prior to the committee meeting.

No cost information was shared during the meeting, and Zvonek later said he did not know how much money the city has spent defending and prosecuting those cases before and since the sentencing changes took effect.

However, he said he was confident that the cost was less than the personal cost to residents of having their vehicles stolen, mentioning the deterrent effect that conservatives have attributed to mandatory minimums.

When asked why the city would invest in the prosecution of one municipal offense that is also handled by district attorneys while pulling back on the prosecution of another to save money, Zvonek said moving domestic violence out of the municipal court would not change the severity of penalties imposed on offenders.

As for the council’s current level of interest in privatizing the Aurora Public Defender Office, Zvonek said the group is not “actively” exploring privatization but that another reason for the shift would be to preserve the option in light of the pending prohibition on flat-fee contracts.

“If it made sense for us to restart that conversation, to not be able to do it because we’re already paying more than we would necessarily need to prosecute these cases in municipal court … just defies common sense,” he said.

Chief public defender Elizabeth Cadiz said after the meeting that her office is not taking a position on the proposal because its direct effect will be on the prosecution rather than the defense of criminal cases.

Should Weissman’s latest bill be signed into law, Zvonek suggested the council assemble a working group involving the city manager and other officials involved in the municipal criminal justice system to plan how to halt domestic violence prosecutions without disrupting pending cases.

Ending those prosecutions if Polis signs Weissman’s bill and continuing the two mandatory minimum sentencing policies earned the unanimous support of the committee, which includes Jurinsky and council members Stephanie Hancock and Steve Sundberg. The next step for the items will be a study session or regular council meeting.

The proposal to shift the location of prosecutions was first announced by Jurinsky in March, before she became the victim of an alleged incident of domestic violence herself during the weekend of April 13.

While an affidavit describing the details of the alleged incident remains sealed, the defendant, Derek Cobb, has since been charged in Arapahoe County District Court with second-degree kidnapping, third-degree assault, obstruction of a telecommunication service and criminal mischief.

Jurinsky has since told Denver broadcaster 9News that her statements during the May 6 council meeting — where she demanded the resignations of Morris, Investigations Division chief Mark Hildebrand and officers Tim Meehan, Brian O’Dell and Seth Robertson — were the result of unspecified poor treatment by Aurora police as a victim of domestic violence.

At the committee meeting, she apologized to O’Dell, saying “several of your colleagues have reached out to me in your defense (and said) that you are truly a good officer.” As for the four other cops, Jurinsky doubled down, saying she “cannot wait to see you leave this city.”

The next hearing in the case is scheduled to take place May 24.