PERRY: Aurora lawmakers target domestic violence victims in trying to wrong a right

Aurora, once known as diverse, sprawling, and innovative really needs to eschew its new moniker as a place where the facts never get in the way of a bad idea.

It was unnerving but not surprising recently when city Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said that the majority block of Republicans on the dais would rather shut down Aurora’s storied domestic violence court than have the state insist the city retain its public defender program.

That’s suddenly a thing in a city where things suddenly become a thing.

Jurinsky’s threat is the result of a failed effort by city lawmakers earlier this year to shut down the city’s public defender office — if it could find a way to privatize the agency with cheaper private-practice attorneys.

The proposal caused an uproar not only among fair-trial advocates, but among critics who said the scheme was nothing more than a bone-headed extension of a “get tough on crime” wave among council conservatives.

Opponents  of the “let’s get privatized” cohort allege council conservatives were unhappy with the success rate of public defenders getting all kinds of charges against municipal court defendants greatly reduced or thrown out.

Maybe. But you have to question the wisdom of people who thought you could even begin to get private attorneys to do the job of public defenders for less. You don’t even have to know a public defender or prosecutor personally to confirm with a quick google search how comparatively little public defenders get paid compared to private-practice lawyers. 

So it was a surprise to pretty much no one who knows what they’re doing when a total of “zero” law firms responded to the city’s request for proposals on privatizing public defense.

Goose egg.

What seemed like closure for a disruptive waste of time in Aurora has now prompted state lawmakers to consider-threaten legislation preventing Aurora or other similar cities from attempting similar “let’s get privatized” schemes.

And that prompted Jurinsky’s “hold my beer” threat last week.

“Should this (bill) pass, the City of Aurora will no longer prosecute domestic violence cases,” Jurinsky said during a March 29 city council committee meeting. “So go ahead and write about that. Go ahead and put it in your pipe and smoke it, because that’s where we’re at.”

What Jurinsky threatens is a level of cruelty and callousness toward domestic violence victims that stands apart even from past “that’s where we’re at” council schemes.

It was decades ago that Aurora stepped up in protecting some of the region’s most vulnerable victims: those who are physically and emotionally beaten and beaten down by their spouses. The victims have long been primarily married women.

Much wiser city officials in the past determined that beaten women hustled through the county court system — often as far away as Brighton — were forced into dire predicaments by the sloth of a court system exacerbated by the chaos that abused women face when police finally intervene on their behalf, even if it isn’t at their behest.

Over the past several years, Aurora developed a highly lauded system to address the myriad issues surrounding the tragic and widespread phenomenon of domestic violence.

Aurora is home to “a novel fast-track program that has expedited domestic violence cases in the city for more than 20 years,” Deputy City Attorney Julie Heckman, who leads the city’s prosecutors, told the Sentinel for 2019 story. “The first to be established in the state, the agreement stipulates that suspected domestic violence offenders are arraigned in municipal court the business day after their arrest, and an immediate pre-trial conference is held if the defendant so desires. Meanwhile, victims are summoned to Gateway’s court advocacy program, also housed in the Aurora courthouse, to learn about charges their partner is facing and what options they have moving forward.”

The innovative program has long been credited with aiding victims and protecting the rights of suspects.

Given many of these council conservatives tout their love of all things Constitutional, a little history could be helpful to them.

In 1961, Florida resident Florence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking into a pool hall and petty theft. Indigent and essentially homeless, he asked for an attorney and was refused. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

There, he studied enough law to write his own appeal to the Supreme Court for an attorney. It heralded one of the most consequential court rulings in U.S. history, “Gideon vs Wainwright.”

In it, the 1963 Supreme Court agreed that the Sixth Amendment right to a free trial is unattainable without an attorney. Because of that, a state-provided attorney for indigents is always mandatory.

“The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in the unanimous opinion. “From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law.”

Equal means equal, and not having a qualified attorney tips the balance in favor of the prosecution. It is not only indisputable, it’s the touchstone of our justice system.

This city council, and Jurinsky in particular, have repeatedly said that they want to see justice for “the victims” of crime, rather than support for the perpetrators.

Here’s their chance to make good on that rhetoric. Stand up for the thousands of women, and men, physically and emotionally beaten and beaten down every year in Aurora and stand behind the city’s domestic violence court system that is tried and true.

And stand up for victims of a police and justice system that is sometimes corrupt or incompetent and even dead wrong during prosecution.

Like Giddeon, sometimes the accused, too, are victims, and regardless, they are deserving and guaranteed fair and equal justice, something unique and precious to America, here in Aurora just like it was in 1963 Florida.

After the Supreme Court decision in Giddeon’s favor, he won the right to a retrial, with a court-appointed attorney. He was acquitted.

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