The Boulder County justice system is still dealing with the “ripple effect” of people missing their court dates during the pandemic, said Michael Dougherty, the county’s district attorney.
Police and deputies issued more court summons when COVID-19 was at its peak, in an effort to “keep the jail population restricted to violent, dangerous offenders,” Dougherty explained.
“Say for example you had a guy going into people’s cars, and stealing property out of the cars — he might’ve been given a ticket during the pandemic, and then failed to appear, and failed to appear, and got another ticket, and failed to appear,” the district attorney said. “He would now be held at the jail for failing to appear.”
Many of those people who didn’t show up for their court dates during the pandemic are now in jail awaiting trial, Dougherty explained.
“Those failures to appear are taking up more bench space than they normally would,” he said.
“Because they missed court dates on multiple occasions, and now they’re in custody on multiple cases.”
Around 80% of the Boulder County Jail population is currently awaiting trial, according to Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle.
“It’s been that way for the past several months — it’s been as high as 85%,” Pelle explained. “It’s normally about 60/40 — it’s normally about 60% pre-trial, 40% sentenced.”
The courts were also backlogged during the pandemic, and law enforcement is dealing with a buildup of warrants from multiple jurisdictions, which further complicates the process, the sheriff said.
“It’s not quick to resolve, because it’s very common that people have warrants in Boulder County, Adams County and Larimer County, or Weld County — multiple counties, so they have to be transferred around, and it takes weeks instead of days to get in front of judges and get bonds straightened out,” Pelle explained.
If someone is going to miss their court date, they should call their defense attorney or the court clerk in that courtroom — or both, Dougherty said.
“That happens fairly often, where a defense attorney will show up and say their client’s in the hospital, or they got stuck in traffic, or they got hurt,” Dougherty said. “Then the judge will listen to that reason, and determine whether a warrant should be issued or not.”
The Colorado Legislature has made several revisions to the court process over the past few years in an effort to mitigate the number of missed court dates, said Katharina Booth, Boulder County chief deputy district attorney,
“They instituted a reminder call system, and so a lot of the summonses actually now have this check box at the top and the person gives their phone number and all that, and then they get reminder calls about court,” Booth explained.
If a judge gives someone a warrant because they missed their court date by mistake, they are advised to come into the clerk’s office, she said.
“They can either re-post the bond, or sometimes the clerks can just go take them to the courtroom right then and they start addressing the case, the bond, or the warrant — it’s called quashed, you get the warrant quashed, and you get a new court date,” Booth explained. “So if a person’s taking responsibility for those warrants because it’s more of a missed mistake, then we work with that and don’t necessarily arrest people.”
The number of people in jail awaiting trial is expected to diminish in the coming months as the criminal justice system catches up with the failure to appear warrant backlog, both Dougherty and Pelle said.
