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By SAMUEL LOPEZ
USA HERALD (August 24, 2025)

The Colorado Court of Appeals delivered a stark reminder Thursday that constitutional deadlines don't bend for judicial convenience, reversing a sexual assault conviction and 34-year-to-life sentence because a trial court stretched the speedy trial window by exactly 30 days too many.

In a unanimous decision that reads like a constitutional law seminar wrapped in real-world consequences, the three-judge panel dismantled what they saw as a fundamental misunderstanding of how emergency pandemic provisions actually work. The case of Anastacio Mares isn't just about calendar management—it's about what happens when courts mistake expired statutory authority for ongoing judicial discretion.

Here's where the system broke down: Colorado's speedy trial clock is merciless. Six months from a not-guilty plea, period. Mares entered his plea in June 2022, competency evaluation complete, counsel present, speedy trial rights asserted loud and clear. That gave District Judge Eric M. Johnson until December 13, 2022, to get this case to trial. Not December 14th. Not January anything. December 13th.

Judge Johnson had a problem every trial judge in America knows intimately—too many cases, not enough courtroom time, pandemic backlogs stretching into infinity. So he reached for what looked like a lifeline: a 2021 Colorado statute that allowed courts to push trials back up to three months "to account for the backlog created by the pandemic."Reasonable solution, except for one fatal detail that would ultimately torpedo a conviction—that provision had been dead for eight months.

The COVID-19 trial extension expired in April 2022. Judge Johnson invoked it in August 2022 to schedule Mares' trial for January 2023. The Court of Appeals panel, led by Judge Ted C. Tow III, didn't mince words about this timing problem: "no continuance could be granted under that provision after that time."

What followed was a courtroom chess match that reveals how technical legal arguments can decide real human outcomes. Days before the January trial, Mares' attorney filed a motion to dismiss, citing the speedy trial violation for the first time. The prosecution's response? A multi-pronged attack claiming Mares had waived his right to challenge the expired provision and that defense delays had caused the scheduling conflicts anyway.

Judge Johnson denied the dismissal motion, finding "good cause" to extend the trial date based on docket congestion. But good cause under general case management principles isn't the same as statutory authority under Colorado's speedy trial requirements—a distinction that proved decisive on appeal.

The appellate panel systematically demolished the prosecution's arguments with the kind of methodical legal reasoning that makes constitutional protections more than parchment promises. First, they found that neither McIntosh v. United States nor Harrow v. Department of Defense—the Supreme Court cases the prosecution cited—actually dealt with speedy trial challenges. Wrong constitutional neighborhood entirely.

More importantly, Colorado's speedy trial statute doesn't operate like federal rules that allow judicial balancing tests. "The relevant Colorado statute … explicitly mandates reversal if the deadline is not met," Judge Tow wrote, cutting through any suggestion that courts could weigh competing interests when the six-month clock runs out.

The prosecution's second argument—that defense conduct caused the delays—met an even more definitive rejection. The panel found it "simply cannot be said" that Mares or his counsel were responsible for the scheduling conflicts. More fundamentally, they reminded everyone involved that speedy trial compliance isn't the defendant's job. "The burden of compliance" rests with the court and the District Attorney's Office, not with defense counsel trying to navigate an overburdened system.

The panel drove this point home by citing People v. DeGreat, a 2020 Colorado Supreme Court decision establishing that defendants need only "move for a dismissal prior to trial" to preserve their speedy trial rights. No obligation to police the court's calendar. No duty to remind judges when statutory provisions expire. Just show up and object before the trial starts, which is exactly what Mares did.

What makes this decision particularly instructive is how it illustrates the difference between emergency legal measures and permanent systemic fixes. The 2021 COVID-19 extension wasn't a general grant of authority to manage pandemic backlogs indefinitely. It was a temporary patch with a specific expiration date, and when that date passed, the normal constitutional requirements snapped back into effect immediately.

The remedy here was as automatic as the violation was clear: dismissal with prejudice. No second chances, no do-overs, no opportunity for the state to re-file charges. When Colorado's speedy trial deadline passes without proper justification, the case ends permanently.

For practitioners, this decision reinforces several crucial points about speedy trial practice. First, emergency statutory provisions have shelf lives, and courts can't extend their authority beyond explicit expiration dates. Second, general case management principles don't override specific constitutional deadlines. Third, defendants bear no affirmative duty to monitor court compliance with speedy trial requirements—that responsibility belongs entirely to the system itself.

The broader implications extend beyond individual case management to systemic questions about how courts handle crisis-driven backlogs. The pandemic created genuine administrative challenges that required creative solutions, but those solutions had to operate within constitutional constraints. When temporary measures expire, normal protections resume immediately, regardless of whether underlying problems persist.

Judge Tow's opinion for the panel reads like a civics lesson about how constitutional protections actually function in practice. They're not aspirational guidelines that courts can balance against administrative convenience. They're mandatory constraints that operate automatically, even when compliance creates genuine hardships for an overburdened system.

The state was represented by Frank Ryan Lawson of the Colorado Attorney General's Office. Mares was represented by Esteban A. Martinez of Martinez Law LLC. Judges Ted C. Tow III, David H. Yun and Grant T. Sullivan sat on the panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals.

The case is The People of the State of Colorado v. Anastacio Mares, case number 23CA1003, in the Colorado Court of Appeals.