AURORA The table on the stage of Aurora Central High School’s Auditorium didn’t boast the prestige the state’s judges are likely used to when they take the bench.
When three judges from the Colorado Court of Appeals took their seats on the stage April 21, the makeshift courtroom served their purposes just fine, especially considering the crowd of a few hundred students gathered in the auditorium.
Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Jones, the presiding judge at the April 21 hearing, said events like this are crucial because they give the public a real-life glimpse of what the state’s judicial branch does. Too often people don’t see the three branches of state government in action and that’s especially true for the courts.
“I don’t think there is any substitute to actually being able to see what’s going on,” Jones said.
The state’s “Courts in the Community” program has been around for more than 25 years and typically hosts a handful of hearings every year at area high schools. The hearings feature current cases in front of state judges. The cases this week at Central included Margarita Madrigal v. City of Aurora. In that case, Madrigal sued the city for failing to turn over documents related to the July 2011 slaying of her husband by Aurora police officers.
The officers were cleared of wrongdoing, but Madrigal and her defense team have argued the city violated state law when they failed to turn over documents or at least give Madrigal an explanation as to why they wouldn’t release the documents.
Madrigal’s husband, Juan Contreras, was gunned down just a short distance from Central at East Colfax Avenue and Peoria Street. Police said he found an elderly woman’s keys in a parking lot at East Sixth Avenue and Peoria and tried to extort the woman for $100 in exchange for the keys.
The woman called police and a patrol officer, with the approval of a lieutenant, removed his uniform and went undercover to meet Contreras. During the confrontation, the officer said he tried to arrested Contreras but Contreras reached for a knife. At that point, the officer shot Contreras dead.
Police later said they made a mistake when they used an inexperienced officer to work undercover and didn’t provide him enough backup. But, police said, the officer was justified when he shot Contreras, a position prosecutors backed after a grand jury inquiry.
Madrigal’s case centers not on the slaying of her husband, but instead on city officials’ refusal to provide documents or at least explain why the documents would not be released. An Arapahoe County judge sided with the city and Madrigal appealed the ruling to a higher court.
Kenneth A. Padilla, Madrigal’s lawyer, argued that the city initially rejected Madrigal’s request for documents related to her husband’s death, and later ignored further requests.
“This is a dangerous precedent for a democracy,” he said.
Padilla is asking the city to pay Madrigal’s legal fees as well as a $25-per-day fee allowed under state law when local governments fail to comply with open records laws.
But Martha Fitzgerald, one of the lawyers representing the city, said that while the city made a mistake when officials ignored Madrigal’s request, they didn’t violate the law. Instead, she said, the lower court was correct when they ruled that because the city’s response would have always been that the documents were sealed because of an ongoing criminal investigation, there was no violation.
The court is expected to hand down their ruling in a few weeks.