Vomiting inmates are preparing food for hundreds. Jail phones are not being sanitized after each call. Coughing inmates are not being separated from others. Deputies are wearing gloves, but are using the same ones all day as they interact with dozens of other people.

Those are the conditions that Colorado’s defense attorneys say their clients are subjected to inside Colorado’s jails during the coronavirus pandemic. As deputies and inmates continue to test positive for COVID-19, the state’s defense attorneys are asking the state’s highest court to intervene and create standard rules aimed at decreasing the number of people locked up and preventing the spread of the coronavirus in courts.

The filing comes two days after the first Colorado law enforcement officer — an El Paso County sheriff’s detention Deputy Jeff Hopkins — died from the respiratory disease.

The Colorado Office of the Public Defender, the criminal defense attorney bar and the Office of Alternate Defense Counsel on Friday filed two petitions asking the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court to issue statewide rules about jail depopulation. Chief Justice Nathan Coats on March 16 issued a statewide order suspending many court operations, but left each of the state’s 22 judicial districts to make their own decisions on how to best address the threat of the virus. The order did not address the jails.

“Businesses, restaurants, schools, government offices, and churches are closed,” one petition states. “But for incarcerated people, who live in conditions ripe for rampant spread of disease and lack the autonomy to self-isolate, daily life continues as usual.”

The Colorado Supreme Court will now decide whether to accept jurisdiction over the petition and how to proceed. The court could also reject the petition completely, said Maureen Cain, director of legislative policy and external communications for the Colorado State Public Defender.

The petitions from the defense attorneys ask the chief justice to mandate lower courts do the following:

• reduce the number of arrests and release arrestees on personal recognizance bonds, where possible.
• review cases of people held in jails because they cannot afford their bonds and release them, if safe.
• reduce sentence lengths, convert jail time into home detention or temporarily release inmates.
• automatically allow defendants and attorneys to appear in court via telephone, waiving the need to ask permission.
• limit groups of people in courthouses to no more than 10.
• provide hand sanitizer inside all courtrooms.

The population of state’s largest jails has declined by about a third in response to the threat of the virus, but inmates in many facilities still cannot practice social distancing and rates of depopulation varies by county. That means whether an inmate is released often depends on where they were arrested.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus continues to spread inside Colorado’s criminal justice system. Positive tests include: an inmate at the Weld County jail, three Weld County sheriff’s deputies, a Jefferson County jail deputy, eight El Paso County deputies, three inmates at the Denver downtown jail, three Department of Corrections staff members, multiple public defenders and a Colorado Springs prosecutor.

Thirty-two staff members of the Denver Public Safety Department have tested positive, department spokeswoman Kelli Christensen said Friday, but the city will not identify which agencies they belong to “due to patient privacy.” The safety department includes the police department, sheriff’s department, fire department, 911 communications and community corrections.

A positive diagnosis inside a jail isn’t confined to facility walls, as recent cases show. Two of the Denver jail inmates who tested positive have since been released from the facility on bond, Christensen said. A Weld County inmate contracted the disease despite been incarcerated since 2018, meaning someone brought it into the facility.

“If you spread the disease around the jail, the first responders get sick,” Cain said. “Everybody gets sick.”

The conditions inside jails are creating widespread fear and anxiety among those inside, defense attorneys said in letters attached to the petitions.

“Inmates are starting to feel like they’re getting sick; it felt like a riot was about to break out a few nights ago because people were upset no one was doing anything to keep them from getting sick,” one inmate at the El Paso County jail told his attorney, according to a letter from the Colorado Springs Public Defender’s Office.

The petitions Friday follow calls last week by multiple members of Colorado’s U.S. House delegation that ICE release non-violent immigration detainees on parole.

“ICE detention centers and their contract facilities are a hotbed for the spread of the coronavirus and are a tremendous threat to the health of the detainees, staff, and community as a whole,” Rep. Jason Crow, D-Aurora, said in a news release. “If there are measures we can take to prevent the spread of the virus, we take them. That’s how this needs to work.”

Attorneys and local nonprofits said an unprecedented number of people were released from the Aurora immigration detention center with ankle monitors late last week.

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A group of 12 women were released together on March 26, said Sarah Jackson, founder of Casa de Paz, a nonprofit that helps detainees and their families. The following day, 16 men were released. Jackson believes the detainees are being released on humanitarian parole in response to the virus, though officials have not confirmed that to her organization.

When asked last week if the federal immigration agency was releasing inmates from the Aurora facility in reaction to COVID-19 concerns, a local ICE spokeswoman directed a Denver Post reporter to a webpage about national response to the pandemic that did not contain any information about the local facility.

A report from Crow’s office released March 27 found that 633 people were detained in the facility and nine were quarantined for illness. Seventy-seven detainees had been tested for COVID-19 but results had not yet come in, according to the report

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