Following Aurora City Council’s most recent ban on public comment following a year of protests, protestor MiDian Shofner filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the city, alleging it is silencing her and other speakers.

Shofner, along with family members and other supporters of Kilyn Lewis, have attended every Aurora City Council meeting for more than a year, in which they advocated for charges to be filed and the firing of Aurora Police Department officers involved in the fatal shooting.

The protesters have routinely disrupted the council proceedings.  

Lewis, 37, was shot by SWAT officer Michael Dieck on May 23, 2024, while officers were attempting to arrest him on an attempted murder warrant. He was not armed. 

Providing a narration to a video footage released by the police, then-Interim Chief of Police Heather Morris said Lewis had put his left hand into his pants’ pocket and then took a cellphone out of his back pocket with his right hand. She said that, as he reached for the cell phone, he had his right hand “behind his back, out of view.” And when his hand “came back into view, he was holding an object,” the police said, adding that, at that point, an officer fired a shot.  

Exactly one year after Lewis was shot and killed in late May, the Lewis family filed a lawsuit against Dieck and the City of Aurora, alleging wrongful death.

Dieck was cleared and the shooting was ruled justified by the district attorney. An internal investigation by the Aurora Police Department also cleared him.

A city spokesperson said via email the city has not been served or noticed “so we cannot comment on litigation we have not seen or reviewed.”

“If there is a lawsuit, the city will strongly defend itself against it,” Ryan Luby said via email. 

In the latest City Council meeting, councilmembers voted to hold future council meetings virtually — getting rid of the public comment session — until there is a decision in the lawsuit.

Shofner’s lawsuit against the city claims the decision by councilmembers to end public comment pending a decision in the Lewis family lawsuit is unconstitutional. 

The lawsuit also pointed to a Facebook post written the day after the council meeting by Mayor Mike Coffman. 

In his post, Coffman said the Lewis family’s lawsuit is “meritless,” leaving the protesters “no choice but to continue disrupting our meetings.”

“This is why we have no choice but to stop all in-person council meetings, and go virtual, until their lawsuit has been concluded,” the mayor wrote in the post. 

Coffman also referred to the protesters’ actions as “threatening taunts and harassment.”

In an email, Shofner’s attorneys said the reason for ending public comment, as stated by the mayor in the Facebook post, goes against the First Amendment.

“These direct admissions that public comment was eliminated in order to prevent Ms. Shofner, and others, from continuing to advocate for accountability for the APD’s killing of Mr. Lewis are very clearly constitutionally repugnant,” the attorneys said. “This targeting of certain viewpoints and silencing of the community violates the First Amendment.”

Shofner’s lawsuit claimed the mayor’s “odious viewpoint discrimination” is unconstitutional and that she filed the legal challenge to “vindicate her, and others, right to speak critically of the APD at Aurora City Council meetings.”

Shofner demanded reversal of the public comment decision, a formal written apology and training to avoid similar alleged misconduct. 

In a statement, Shofner said it is an “opportunity for tangible change.” 

“For far too long, Aurora’s City Council has employed tactics of erasure and demonization to suppress those who dare to speak out, to demand justice, and to envision accountability as something more than rhetoric,” Shofner said. “That era must come to an end.”

In the meeting during which the decision was made to hold meetings virtually pending a lawsuit decision, Jurinsky said that the matter is “in the court’s hands now” as to whether or not the city is liable for Lewis’s death.

“As of right now, criminally Michael Dieck did not in fact murder Kilyn Lewis,” Jurinsky said. “If we are not, in fact, liable … there is nothing left to discuss.

“If that takes two years, that takes two years,” she said.