The Durango Municipal Court may have finally found some stability under recently hired Judge Matt Margeson.
After years of what felt like dysfunction – at least in the eyes of the Durango Police Department – Police Chief Brice Current said the municipal court is taking steps in the right direction.
“The judge is a bit of a visionary and a strategist,” Current said.
He added that part of the reason for the positive change is Margeson’s understanding of the law and his understanding of the city’s limited resources when it comes to incarcerating people, making restorative programs all the more important.
“It takes all of that to make a functional municipal court,” he said.
In recent years, the court struggled to keep up with repeat offenders committing petty crimes, because it didn’t have a system to ensure they show up for court hearings. Before to the hiring of Margeson, the city had two part-time judges who oversaw municipal court.
What’s more, enforcement became difficult because petty crimes were often punished only with citations, and the municipal court was not issuing arrest warrants to defendants who failed to show up for court.
“They were issuing citation after citation, which were clearly not being effective, because no one would show up for their court hearings,” said City Councilor Melissa Youssef. “... We didn’t have processes in place to hold them accountable.”
Margeson served nine years in the district attorney’s office for the 22nd Judicial District, which has jurisdiction in Montezuma and Dolores counties. He was the elected district attorney for about 2½ years. In February 2023, Gov. Jared Polis picked him to preside as the Dolores County court judge.
Margeson had also assisted Durango City Attorney Mark Morgan in the city attorney’s office before taking the municipal court judge position.
But the emergence of an active municipal court system has created a dilemma for the La Plata County Jail. On Aug. 1, La Plata County Sheriff Sean Smith said in a letter to the city that the jail would no longer be holding low-level offenders arrested on municipal charges, such as failure to appear in municipal court or unpaid traffic tickets.
Smith cited jail population growth surpassing its maximum occupancy threshold of 195 inmates per day as the primary reason.
One of the reasons petty offenders had not been facing jail time before the emergence of the new municipal court was in response to COVID-19 regulations.
City Manager José Madrigal said during the COVID-19 pandemic, the La Plata County Jail had to make adjustments to keep inmates socially distanced. In an effort to help, the city stopped sending petty offenders to jail in favor of issuing repeat citations.
Jails were considered hot spots for the virus and in January 2022, 29 of 135 inmates were suspected of being positive for COVID-19, along with 13 staff members at the jail.
Current said the jail has limited holding cells, making it difficult for officers to place petty offenders in custody.
But with fewer and less severe penalties for noncompliance came more offenses by familiar faces.
Notably, Current shared a story in which one offender would enter convenience stores and throw beer bottles against the wall. Police would issue the offender a citation, but after receiving the citation, the offender would take another bottle and drink it in front of officers.
Because officers were only able to issue citations without knowing if it would be enforced by the court, it created a lack of deterrence.
“Part of the problem with a municipal court and a functionality of it (is that) we focus on the suspects,” Current said. “You need to think about the community as a whole. That means the suspect, the community, the victims – and take more of a consolidated approach.”
There was another instance in which a man broke a window washer’s tool over his knee on Main Avenue without consequences.
“You have somebody that just lost $300 in equipment they bought to start their business, and we give the individual a ticket,” Current said.
But with a new judge and a shift in judicial philosophy, it creates a stronger deterrence against petty crime, he said.
It is difficult to quantify how successful the court has been, Current said, but at least it has been functional.
Judge Margeson has been trying to implement a problem-solving court – something that could reduce the number of inmates housed at the La Plata County Jail if successful. Problem-solving courts involve the usage of a pre-plea agreement program that offers services like mental health and substance use counseling before entering a plea.
The program consists of three phases: identification of defendants who would benefit from the resources available; providing services and support to defendants entering the program; and a maintenance phase in which the court and providers ensure the defendant is meeting program goals. Services like mental health and drug-use counseling could be used in place of detention.
The idea is to reduce recidivism by getting to the root of the problem rather than simply a punitive action.
“I want people to come into court and have a positive experience, even if the most positive things aren’t necessarily happening to them,” Margeson said. “At least they feel like they’re being treated fairly.”
Last month, Durango received a $42,789 grant to help fund the municipal court for the transformative court.
“We’re really happy with the changes that we’re seeing at the court level, especially with regards to the new specialty court for mental health and substance abuse issues,” Youssef said. “That seems to be something we really needed in our community.”
Current dubs Durango “a small city with big-city problems.”
In June, he said the department receives about 100 calls to service per day for a police force with only 58 officers. By comparison, many Front Range agencies receive the same number of calls with staff sizes ranging from 150 to 200 officers, he said.
Current said the more times an officer must deal with a public intoxication call or petty offenses involving substance use, the more likely a situation may involve physical force – something officers try to avoid if possible.
Police forces across the country have been put under a microscope ever since the killing of George Floyd in 2020, leading many agencies to look at how they interact with the public.
“It just makes the entire community safer if you can reduce the number of contacts that you have,” Current said.
“The real issue is reducing the number of times that anybody has to put their hands on another human being,” he said. “Because if you talk about protecting the vulnerable, the vulnerable may be the suspect.”
tbrown@durangoherald.com
