Colorado Editorial Roundup

The Durango Herald, Jan. 1, on a Colorado court fees case to be heard by the Supreme Court:

A strange facet of a Colorado law will be the central feature of a U.S. Supreme Court case to be heard by the high court Jan. 9. It is an interesting case and worthy of attention in that it focuses on the very meaning of due process.

At issue is the presumption of innocence and whether the state of Colorado can effectively reverse that. It is arguing that to recoup money seized in the course of a criminal prosecution, a defendant who has been acquitted of all charges must prove “actual innocence.”

Shannon Nelson was originally charged with 40 counts concerning alleged sexual and physical abuse of her four children. In 2006, she was convicted on five counts. She appealed. The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the decision and sent her case back to the lower court. She was retried, and a jury acquitted her of all charges.

None of that is in dispute.

The question now is whether and under what circumstances Colorado has to refund money she was charged. With her original conviction, Nelson was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to pay court costs, fees and restitution totaling more than $8,000. In that she had no money, the Colorado Department of Corrections applied funds from her inmate account to the debt. By the time she was ultimately acquitted, the DOC had taken $702.10 of her money. She wants it back.

She took the matter to court and a district court ruled that it had no authority to order her reimbursed. An appeals court effectively said it does. The state then appealed and the Colorado Supreme Court said no, it does not.

Backed in part by the Cato Institute, a think tank that describes itself as “dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace,” Nelson’s case has been taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

What the court will look at in Nelson vs. Colorado is the state’s contention that she is eligible for relief by way of Colorado’s Exoneration Act, which Gov. John Hickenlooper signed into law in 2013. That bill was aimed largely at compensating people (up to $70,000 per year) who were wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Nelson just wants her money back.

What is troubling about the state’s contention is the Exoneration Act’s provision that Nelson must prove by “clear and convincing evidence” that she is “actually innocent” and not simply “legally innocent.”

Presumably that provision exists because lawmakers did not want to be seen giving taxpayer money to someone set free on what talk show critics might call “a technicality.”

But can the courts or the Legislature even make such a distinction? Can either in effect say there is a difference between guilty under the law and guilty in fact?

For the state to require Nelson to prove she committed no crime after she was acquitted by a jury raises a troubling question: Does being acquitted not mean not guilty? Or is that something that depends on what the Legislature thinks?

Nelson and her lawyers contend that provision of the Exoneration Act violates her right to due process under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It will be interesting to find out if the Supreme Court agrees.

Editorial: https://bit.ly/2iBqlps

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The Denver Post, Jan. 2, on Denver’s ethics rules:

For too long the public has been in the dark about the value of meals and tickets that lobbyists and others with city business have lavished on Denver officials.

Ethics requirements in this home-rule city are so weak that elected officials are, for the most part, simply to list, once a year, and in some dark file room that’s not accessible by the internet, that they received a gift and who it came from. That said, the rules do have some real value. Officials can’t take money or loans, for example. And they are limited to how many perks like meals and tickets they can accept from a single entity.

After two years of work, the Denver City Council is on the verge of increasing what city officials must report in gift disclosures, how often the disclosures must be filed and requiring that the reports be made available online.

Self-imposed regulation is never easy, and we applaud the efforts of City Council members, particularly Councilman Kevin Flynn, to tackle this needed reform.

The council is expected to vote Tuesday night on a bill that would revise municipal code so that elected and appointed officials must disclose twice a year “the identification, estimated value, and the source of any gifts . in excess of $50.”

Councilwoman Robin Kniech has a proposal that would drop the threshold for reporting so all gifts are reported. Her idea makes sense, given that some groups may give multiple gifts just under the threshold for reporting that may elude scrutiny.

It seems likely the bill will pass and we hope that happens.

But disclosing the value and the source of gifts is just the first step.

Flynn is working on a bill that would also impose financial limits to the gifts from individual sources.

We hope the upgrades cut down on some of the extravagance we suspect is occurring, simply because before officials accept a steak at The Palm Restaurant, they’ll consider how it’ll look come re-election time.

State officials abide by the overly stringent Amendment 41 limits that ban gifts, even beverages, from lobbyists completely and limits other gifts to essentially $50 plus any inflation since voters passed the amendment in 2006.

Elected officials at the state level have said that strict limit has stifled the ordinary interactions between the makers of laws and those impacted by them (but that’s for another editorial, another day).

We hope officials find the political will to impose a reasonable limit of some sort on gifts in the coming months - Flynn’s proposal is around $300 per group, per year. That seems like a reasonable jumping-off point.

And while we’re making our wish list, we still think it would be prudent for city officials to create a system for anonymous reporting of ethics complaints. Certainly the ethics commission can ferret out legitimate complaints from the frivolous. We feel that requiring every ethics complaint to be signed by an accuser stifles a whistleblower environment that can be healthy for an organization.

That issue has been a dicey one and we’re glad the board is moving forward where they can with consensus.

An update of the 2001 Code of Ethics was long overdue, and even if it’s a piecemeal approach, city officials deserve our respect for tackling it in this new year.

Editorial: https://dpo.st/2hOBoXT

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The Aurora Sentinel, Dec. 28, on the Rene Lima-Martin case:

Despite a long list of wrongs in 2016, Gov. John Hickenlooper can set one thing right: Commute the sentence of Rene Lima-Marin.

You probably know Marin’s story. When Marin was a teenager barely old enough to smoke, he and an accomplice stupidly and wrongly robbed two Aurora video stores at gunpoint. Fortunately, no one was hurt during the 1998 robberies.

Marin was convicted in 2000 and sentenced to 98 years in prison as part of a plea bargain. His lawyers told him that if he behaved, he would serve only a few years.

In 2008, he was paroled.

Like so many parolees don’t, Marin turned his life around. He got a job as a glass glazer. He met a woman and fell in love. He adopted her son, and they got married and had a child of their own.

Six years later, after Marin had become the model of what we would hope all Colorado convicts become, Marin was notified that his parole had been a mistake. A clerk had made a recording error years ago, and he was inadvertently released early. A pack of cops arrived to take him back to prison.

So a man who’d done something heinously wrong, and then did something astonishingly right, now sits in prison, at a cost of about $34,000 a year to taxpayers.

As ridiculous as this all sounds, the insult to the public’s injury here is compounded by the fact that there are two easy remedies to the situation.

One, Marin’s case, which he appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, has been sent back to Arapahoe County District Court. Judge Carlos A. Samour has been pondering Marin’s fate for months, saying he needs to do more legal research before deciding what to do next.

It’s not a legal question any more. It’s a question of common sense and humanity. Marin spent eight years in prison. Eight years. He was released and not only complied with his parole terms, but by all accounts exceeded them. He undoubtedly proved his rehabilitation by being a contributing and responsible member of the community for six years.

But because of the state’s mistake, not his, he is no longer paying taxes and is instead spending vast sums of the public’s money. He no longer is working to improve Colorado and the lives of his family, but he is instead risking his rehabilitation by being shut inside a system that has a dismal record of creating other success stories like Marin’s.

Samour should immediately amend his sentence and get Marin out of prison and home where he belongs.

But prosecutors, right here in Arapahoe County, are fighting against the appeal, saying that Marin eventually discovered the clerical error and didn’t tell state officials about it, which would have ended his freedom. Because he withheld that information, he’s not qualified for release.

Marin’s a convict, not an idiot.

Who among us in Marin’s position would have ratted themselves out to go back to prison? What law did Marin break by not incriminating himself and his future by revealing someone else’s error?

Regardless, there’s another way to correct this foolish error. Hickenlooper can immediately commute Marin’s sentence. In fact, 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler on these opinion pages recently appealed to Hickenlooper to use his never-used power of pardon and commutation to give mercy and leniency where it’s so obviously deserved - just like this case.

While Brauchler could, and should, follow his own good advice and speed up correcting this wrong by asking his prosecutors to retract their objection for Marin’s appeal, Hickenlooper doesn’t have to wait for anyone or anything to simply do what government needs to do more of: the right thing.

Editorial: https://bit.ly/2iCz0pf