Nowhere is the human condition more vivid than in Durango Municipal Court on Wednesday mornings, where, every year, thousands of La Plata County residents find themselves accused of violating a city code.
At 7.30 a.m. in court last week, about 30 people waited to meet with city prosecutor David Liberman.
One young woman left court crying. Another, an 18-year-old Fort Lewis College student in a hot pink shirt, took selfies before telling Liberman she’d happily plead no contest to driving with flagrantly displayed drug paraphernalia.
Just two of the defendants wore suits. The rest wore sweatpants, jackets, shirts stained with coffee; faces were crinkled with sleep. They looked, in other words, like us.
When you speed, your dog bites someone, you pee in public or drunkenly desecrate public property – you’ll end up in municipal court, said Judge Diane Knutson.
If you polled the people appearing in municipal court for moving violations and consuming alcohol underage, a large majority would no doubt vote that life is unfair.
“And indeed, it is unfair,” said veteran city prosecutor Bill Corwin, who has joyfully dealt with thousands of Durango’s lawbreakers – including the chronically unlucky, the magnificently indignant and the harrowingly remorseful – for at least two decades.
Corwin said he likes his job in part because he gets to meet so many people.
“Every week, I see some of the fanciest names in Durango. Everybody, and I mean everybody, ends up in municipal court,” he said.
At this level in the justice system, there is human tragedy as well as divine comedy.
In the clerks’ office hangs a framed, if mangled, pink speeding citation with a placard beneath, reading: “Judge, the dog actually ate my ticket.”
Corwin said he has collected a lot of material for his memoir.
“I’ve heard a lot of defenses that don’t work under the law, but I’ve never heard a bad defense,” he said.
He recalled that years ago, one of his “favorite defendants” was ticketed after he and his homeless friends dined at multiple restaurants and started animatedly lecturing fellow restaurant-goers about politics, refusing to desist after staff intervened.
“His defense was he was running for president,” Corwin said. “How do you tell him that he can’t campaign?”
Though the fines sting, people often seem to care less about pleading guilty than about getting to tell their side of the story.
Last week, one man – a frequent flier in municipal court who described himself as indigent – gallantly acknowledged his long history of getting dinged for trespassing on private property. But he told Liberman that he really resented his most recent trespassing citation because, “I wasn’t even there very long.”
Another adult man with a speeding ticket brought his mother as his advocate.
The man told Liberman the officer who had issued him a ticket “was rude to me. So I was rude to him.”
Liberman patiently explained a universal truth: Police officers, even discourteous ones, still have the power to ticket you, so as a policy, it’s often best not to talk back.
The man responded with iron-clad reason.
“I’m not going to kiss his butt. It’s not like I threatened him. I just thought we could talk like men,” he said.
At the La Plata County Courthouse, where more serious offenses like fraud and homicide are adjudicated, proceedings are often starchy and the relationships are adversarial: Defense attorneys argue with prosecutors about abstruse technicalities; defendants, meanwhile, keep their mouths determinedly shut.
But in municipal court, people rarely lawyer up, meaning prosecutors Corwin and Liberman deal directly with the accused.
The resulting courtroom exchanges are remarkably candid, and they foster unusually avuncular dynamics between city prosecutors and the people they’re prosecuting.
Toward the end of one memorable docket last year, Judge Jim Casey balked when Corwin recommended that he defer sentencing for one miserable-looking young man, who stood accused of a battery of offenses, including public urination, public intoxication, trespassing, vandalizing public and private property and getting obstreperous with police.
Corwin told Casey that the young man’s wrongdoing all stemmed from a single night, when, “his girlfriend broke off their four-year engagement, and he downed a bottle of vodka. It just sounds very sad.”
Indeed, municipal court often feels like a pageant of human fallibility.
Last week, Liberman asked rafting guide Christopher Jessett, who had been ticketed this summer for inappropriate slumbering, “Why were you sleeping in a raft?”
Jessett said, “We just sleep out there in rafts.”
Casey said spiritually, municipal court “really is a community court. Most of the people in front of us are our neighbors. People make mistakes. And we try not to be cookie-cutter about sentencing and instead deal with each person’s circumstances when they come in,” he said.
That sense of compassionate, humane, detail-oriented justice was evident that Wednesday morning last week.
Though the docket was running an hour behind, Knutson, aided by court clerk and translator Loana Serrano, meticulously walked Emiliano Naranjo, owner of Christina’s Grill & Bar, who had been ticketed by wildlife officers for problems relating to a bear-proof trash can used by his restaurant, through each of his options.
Knutson – like Casey, Corwin and Liberman – said she loved her job.
“I feel like I can make a difference, and if I treat people with respect, I get respect back. We try to make it a user-friendly court and explain people’s rights in a way that defendants can understand them,” she said.
Liberman, who himself has been ticketed for speeding, said that in dealing with almost every defendant, there was a sense of “but for the grace of God go I.”
“It’s my job to enforce the law, and I do. But most of the time, these crimes are very minor. The cases I get most all the time are either speeding tickets or college kids being stupid.”
Corwin said he sees his job as “just trying to keep the kids out of trouble. Even the kids who happen to be 45 years old.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
