Articles

Preserving the Integrity of a Quasi-Judicial Hearing (Round One)

A primary duty of a city attorney in a council hearing is to guard against improper encroachments on a city council’s collective decision-making process, sometimes at the risk of retaliation. Preventing procedural defects helps guard municipal decisions from being overturned by a court. City attorneys must be permitted to fulfill such a duty even in high-stakes hearings, like the one that occurred in Thornton on November 17, 2020, as I was finishing my fourth (and last) year as the Thornton City Attorney.

Elected Officials often need to navigate through a public hearing called a “quasi-judicial” hearing. A land developer’s re-zoning request is usually such a hearing. Quasi-judicial hearings are like a court trial in at least three very important ways. Like court decisions, Elected Officials’ decisions must be:

1. Based on the evidence in the hearing record;

2. Based on legal criteria in the city or town code; and

3. Made by impartial decision-makers.

Recently listening to a 2021 national update on police reforms, I heard a police “expert” discuss the impact that Colorado’s Senate Bill 20-217 had on the “fleeing felon” rule. He incorrectly described the pre-2020 fleeing felon rule, announced in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), as “essentially say[ing] that an officer can use deadly force to stop a fleeing felon” and that SB 20-217 changed this rule. This misstatement from a “police expert” in a national presentation is very concerning and potentially deadly. Hopefully, your law enforcement jurisdiction employs an experienced police chief and legal advisor that would spot this serious error.

Domestic disturbances all too often involve an angry and dangerous intimate partner or ex-partner and then a call for police assistance, saying, “Hey, can I get somebody to come over to my house, my ex-husband is in the garage, he will not leave, he’s drunk and it’s going to get ugly real quick.” That was the 911 call made on August 12, 2016 in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The dispatcher then said, “If we send somebody out there, he will go to jail for being intoxicated in public, if that’s what you want to happen.” “Yes, that is.”