Colorado’s second-highest court ruled for the first time last week that a domestic violence conviction under a municipal ordinance will bar a person from purchasing a firearm, thanks to a recent revision in federal law.

The question required a three-judge Court of Appeals panel to answer whether a Denver man’s local domestic violence charge, while not officially labeled a misdemeanor, nonetheless fell under the category of “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” The panel believed it did.

“Misdemeanors are ‘crimes that are less serious than a felony and punishable by fine, penalty, forfeiture, or confinement, usually for a period of a year or less,'” wrote Judge Timothy J. Schutz in the May 1 opinion. “It could not have been Congress’s intent, he continued, to let local governments circumvent the firearm prohibition “by not classifying offenses that authorize a possible jail sentence of up to a year as misdemeanors.”

In January 1997, Andrew Marquez was charged — wrongfully, he argued — with a municipal assault offense, based on allegations of domestic violence. He later contended that he felt compelled to plead guilty because he did not have money to bond out of jail, and he was assured a guilty plea would amount to a “slap on the wrist” with immediate release.

The offense carried up to one year in jail, but Marquez received probation and anger management classes as a punishment.

Twenty-six years later, Marquez sought to withdraw his plea as unconstitutional and based on newly discovered evidence. Around the same time, he attempted to buy a gun. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation rejected the purchase, citing Marquez’s 1997 domestic violence conviction.

Marquez appealed that denial, but the bureau noted that in 2022, Congress amended the prohibition on firearm purchases. Now, the prohibition applicable to domestic violence offenses includes misdemeanors under federal, tribal state and local law.

During an August 2023 hearing about whether Marquez could vacate his guilty plea, Denver County Court Judge Chelsea Malone determined he could not. She added that while “I don’t think that’s an issue for this Court to resolve,” she did not consider Marquez’s municipal conviction to be a misdemeanor.

“We don’t call them misdemeanors,” said Malone, formerly a Denver public defender. “I don’t recall anyone referring to municipal ordinance violations as misdemeanors. … It’s an unclassified municipal ordinance violation.”

Marquez then challenged the bureau’s denial of his firearm purchase, pointing to Malone’s comments. District Court Judge Andrew P. McCallin disagreed, believing the bureau was correct to interpret a misdemeanor as “any offense other than a felony.”

Turning to the Court of Appeals, Marquez argued Congress did not include a standard definition of a misdemeanor, meaning local governments could independently decide whether to label a domestic violence offense as one. He also cited the Denver District Attorney’s website, which lists municipal offenses separately from misdemeanors.

“Taken together, the City and County of Denver stands unparalleled in its authority to create classes of offenses in anyway it chooses, such as the one for which Mr. Marquez has been convicted,” wrote Marquez’s attorneys.

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office reiterated that “widely used legal reference materials” all define a misdemeanor as any crime that is not a felony. Moreover, the same district attorney webpage Marquez cited also labels domestic violence as a misdemeanor.

Ultimately, the Court of Appeals panel agreed Marquez’s conviction counted as a local domestic violence misdemeanor. It expressed no opinion about whether the 2022 change in federal law was unconstitutionally retroactive, finding Marquez did not specifically raise that claim in the litigation.

The case is Marquez v. Schaefer.