What Do You Call Counties Without Lawyers?

The summer 2020 attack had been well-documented. Alamosa County authorities photographed the severe bruises across Welch’s arms, legs, and chest, and she recounted the assault in an eight-page, single-spaced statement to investigators from the 12th Judicial District, which covers southern Colorado’s vast San Luis Valley. With a warrant issued for her ex-fiancé, she described the paralyzing daily impacts post-traumatic stress had on her life. Most nights, she lay awake in her house north of Alamosa, certain her attacker would return.

Authorities apprehended the man seven months later in Archuleta County, two hours away, and charged him with felony stalking and misdemeanor assault and telephone obstruction in two separate cases. By then, incumbent District Attorney Robert Willett had lost his primary to fellow Democrat Alonzo Payne. Payne later ran unopposed in the general election that fall on a slate of progressive reforms that included eliminating cash bail and ending what he called the “criminalization of poverty” across the judicial district. Though 44-year-old Payne was a rookie prosecutor, Welch knew the new district attorney was a valley native and thought he understood the need to care for his neighbors. She thought he wanted to help.

But in March 2021, as Welch drove to Alamosa for a hearing on her case, Payne called. The DA was dismissing the most serious charges against Welch’s ex-fiancé. “It was totally out of the blue,” Welch, now 51, told me this past winter as she recounted the ordeal, which ended with her alleged assailant being convicted on the telephone obstruction charge that carried a maximum 18-month jail sentence. Welch began shaking uncontrollably and had to pull off the road. (Payne was unavailable for comment.)

A few weeks later, Welch learned Payne may have violated Colorado’s Victim Rights Act, which mandates that criminal justice agencies consult victims about their cases. Welch filed a formal complaint against the DA that spring after receiving help from the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center. Clues about the prosecutor’s faltering office quickly became evident. In one instance, Payne erroneously told a judge that a victim was unwilling to testify and moved to dismiss charges. Another time, Payne didn’t notify two victims before dismissing a two-year-old case the day it was scheduled for trial.

Welch also claims Payne told her that her former fiancé had no prior convictions. In fact, he had seven previous domestic violence convictions. (He’s currently facing a felony strangulation charge in El Paso County in another domestic violence-related case.) “I was supposed to be protected,” Welch says. “But I was treated like an inconvenience.” Feeling betrayed, she initiated a recall campaign against Payne. The district attorney ultimately resigned in July 2022, but the professional damage had been done: The now-former DA was disbarred three months later.

Although Payne’s brief tenure proved disastrous, the odds were steeply against him from the start. His budget accommodated six prosecutors to cover an area roughly the size of New Jersey, but finding lawyers willing to work in his remote region proved a Sisyphean task. On Payne’s first day, his office had three lawyers for a caseload that included 10 open homicide investigations, three attempted homicides, and multiple sex assaults. Investigations continued to pile up.

The realities of an inexperienced prosecutor running a rural, understaffed office quickly became clear: State investigators discovered more than 300 unfiled cases languishing on Payne’s desk, plus a slew of angry victims, judges, and law enforcement agencies. “I really think that he took it over with good intentions, but he was so in over his head,” says Anne Kelly, whom Governor Jared Polis eventually appointed to replace Payne. “But what he did about it was dismiss major cases and plead homicides down to nothing.” In this far-off place, it seemed justice never stood a chance.

They’re ridiculed and criticized—called bloodsuckers, leeches, or worse. Some of the best jokes come at their expense.

Why don’t sharks attack lawyers?

Professional courtesy.

But when you need representation—for a divorce, for a business deal, for a dispute with your landlord—a dearth of trained professionals isn’t so funny. At least nine of Colorado’s 64 counties have fewer than 10 private attorneys living within their borders, according to Colorado’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, which keeps data on law licenses. Four Eastern Plains counties don’t have a single lawyer. Overall, a third of Colorado’s counties record fewer than one attorney for every 1,000 residents, a threshold the American Bar Association (ABA) considers a “desert,” where access to legal representation is at its most challenging. That adds up to nearly 300,000 Coloradans living in legal deserts—a number equivalent to the populations of Fort Collins, Boulder, and Golden combined.

It’s easy to understand why most lawyers choose to hang their shingles in big cities: Small towns offer fewer restaurants, sporting events, bars, and other amenities to lure prospective residents. Then there’s the money. First-year deputy district attorneys and public defenders earn $80,000 a year in Kit Carson County, for example, but they might make six figures at a firm in metro Denver. “This is a market-driven thing, and the market’s unfortunately not there in these rural places,” says Marci Fulton, the assistant dean for employer relations and outreach at the University of Colorado Law School. “At the end of the day, it comes down to basic economics.”

In 2020, an ABA webinar called legal deserts “a threat to justice,” because they disproportionately harm the poorest Americans. Prospective clients can search for months for representation—if they find it at all—and often pay oppressive costs for a metro-area lawyer to travel hours for a court hearing. “You get a Denver lawyer at $400 an hour, and you’re looking at $1,600 just so the guy can drive to the court parking lot, turn around, and go home,” says Craig Fidler, a private attorney from Parker who also has an office in Burlington, a dozen miles from the Kansas border. The 69-year-old handles Eastern Plains cases for the Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel, a state agency that supports low-income defendants. “I’m just gonna keep doing this until I drop dead,” Fidler says. “They need representation out here. They need lawyers.”

The lack of available lawyers has been particularly difficult on prosecutors. Former Fremont County District Attorney Linda Stanley was disbarred in September 2024 after her understaffed office mishandled at least 20 cases and missed deadlines for handing over evidence to the court. In northeastern Colorado’s 13th Judicial District, the district attorney cycled through 19 lawyers across five positions in just four years, says Tom Raynes, a former rural DA who heads the Denver-based Colorado District Attorneys’ Council. The Seventh Judicial District, which covers six counties in western Colorado, including rural Hinsdale and San Miguel, has lost one out of every three prosecutors annually over the past four years—including a 56 percent turnover rate in 2024. The unrelenting churn pushed District Attorney Seth Ryan to resign this past fall. Running an office in a legal desert took “a significant toll on my physical and mental health,” Ryan wrote in a letter to constituents. “It is no longer sustainable for me to cover the daily requirements of court schedules across our nearly 10,000-square-mile district while effectively managing, developing, and supervising staff…. [C]ircumstances beyond my control cannot be overcome.”

Failing resources don’t affect just prosecutors, though. Tenants have trouble finding attorneys to challenge evictions; towns and counties struggle to hire lawyers to represent their communities; elderly residents can’t get someone to hash out the details of their children’s future estates.

In Springfield, a town of 1,300 residents 30 miles from Oklahoma, only two private attorneys live within an hour’s drive. Yuma County, near the Kansas border, has around seven private attorneys for nearly 10,000 residents. Neighboring Kit Carson, Phillips, and Washington counties have 10 private attorneys, combined. “We are at a crisis level,” says Raymond Laws, 34, one of about 20 lawyers in Fort Morgan, roughly an hour from the Nebraska border. Twenty years earlier, there were 31 attorneys registered in his town. “You don’t want to see a lawyer until you really, really need a lawyer,” Laws says. “Then that person becomes the most important thing in the world to you.”

After taking over the 12th Judicial District following Payne’s resignation, in 2022, Anne Kelly quickly learned how little of her new job involved courtroom work and how much consisted of posting positions to online job boards. “I got one lawyer that way,” the district attorney says. “I needed eight.”

Kelly grew up in upstate New York, went to law school at New York City’s Fordham University, and worked for metro-area district attorneys in some of Colorado’s largest judicial districts. When she was offered the Alamosa post in September 2022, Kelly had been the senior deputy in Boulder County’s DA office for nearly four years and was known for championing women’s rights in domestic violence cases. The Colorado District Attorneys’ Council sent an email asking for help with issues in the San Luis Valley, and Kelly volunteered to spend two weeks assisting staff and managing the 12th’s DA office. “I packed my dog; I’m like, ‘I’ll go on hikes,’ ” says Kelly, now 48. A month later, she was named the district attorney.

Kelly called in favors from prosecutor friends and begged them to look through cases—to help figure out which ones needed a plea offer, which ones should be dismissed, and which ones might require a trial. She advertised positions that took more than two years to fill. She discovered that a subscription to the job-search site Indeed allowed her to view résumés and reach out directly to prospective employees. Over two years, Kelly has sent more than 2,500 emails. She writes to prospects about the San Luis Valley’s beauty, the chance to work cases most first- and second-year prosecutors would never sniff in bigger cities. Though Kelly now has seven attorneys—more than twice that of her disbarred predecessor—the staff is still stretched. Some lawyers have dockets with hundreds of cases. When she started, Kelly would encourage prosecutors to offer plea deals so they could focus on bigger cases. “You sometimes wonder if you’re giving these victims the absolute best, but we’re working with what’s available to us right now,” Kelly says. “This job is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

One Tuesday in December, Kelly drove 25 minutes from her office in Alamosa to Antonito, a town six miles north of the New Mexico border. The Conejos County Courthouse caught fire during the summer, and damage had made the building unusable while it was being repaired. Consequently, most court proceedings were moved to Antonito’s fire station. Losing the smoke-damaged courthouse produced some oddities in the 12th Judicial District, like when Kelly gave her opening arguments during a wrongful death trial inside the 97-year-old Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church. When she looked up, she saw a sign advertising bingo night.

By the time Kelly arrived at the fire station that day, the gravel parking lot was beginning to fill. One of her deputy prosecutors was on vacation, which meant the already skeleton staff was scrambling to cover cases across the valley. This morning, Kelly was mostly handling low-end traffic offenses to help out. A court employee watched through a window and made sure no one parked in front of the fire station’s three massive bay doors, behind which were pumper trucks, engines, and at least one ambulance. A sheriff’s deputy searched visitors who walked into the linoleum-floored room that had been converted into a makeshift courtroom. Defendants took seats in metal folding chairs. They fidgeted as they waited for the county judge to call their names.

Kelly sat up front, on the left, at one of two plastic folding tables reserved for attorneys. A large American flag was tacked to the white wall, near framed photos of tanker trucks and other emergency vehicles. A Fireworks World Outlet calendar (“More Bang 4 Your Buck!”) from 2022 was pinned to a bulletin board. Kelly familiarized herself with the cases on her laptop while the judge—who, like many lawyers in places like this, held down multiple legal jobs, including serving as the Alamosa County attorney—went down his docket. One by one, he called names. Defendants raised their hands and walked to a podium between the folding tables. One was a young man charged with driving under the influence and failing to report an accident.

“I see you still need to hire an attorney,” the judge said.

“I’m still working on it,” the young man replied.

The toxicology report hadn’t yet been issued, so a new court date was set for early 2025. Before he dismissed the defendant, the judge repeated that the man should find an attorney. The charges carried a possible 365-day sentence, the judge warned. The defendant stiffened, nodded, and shuffled away.

Outside the fire station a few minutes later, the man put on a trucker-style hat. “Three hundred and sixty-five days?” he said. “I wasn’t ready for that.” He lived in Monte Vista, a town geographically closer to Taos, New Mexico, than Pueblo; the fire station was a 90-minute round-trip drive. He said he didn’t qualify for a public defender. An attorney in Alamosa had offered to take the case but didn’t have good reviews. One lawyer, 180 miles away in Colorado Springs, wanted $10,000. “I don’t have anywhere near that,” the man told me. He planned to search for an affordable attorney when he returned home that night. He wasn’t hopeful. “This is really rough,” he said.

The morning docket continued inside the firehouse. A defendant without an attorney who needed a continuation on his case. Another DUI. A careless driving charge. Another defendant without an attorney.

“I’m still trying to find one,” the woman told the judge.

Solving Colorado’s legal desert problem has been a vexing proposition for years, and it’s only getting more difficult. CU’s law school awards scholarships to students who intern in rural communities, but few have taken it up on the offer. The Colorado Office of the State Public Defender gives recruits who spend at least two years in a rural locale the opportunity to transfer to a prime metro-area post in the future. Private attorneys nearing retirement age have advertised turnkey law firms—flush with client lists—for free. There are no takers.

In recent years, many rural prosecutors have defected to county and district judgeships, lured by higher salaries. State lawmakers responded in 2024 by boosting assistant district attorneys’ pay in these rural jurisdictions, but the increase doesn’t take effect until 2026—and there’s little evidence that it will solve the attorney deficit. In northeast Colorado’s 13th Judicial District, where the cost of living is nearly half that of the Denver metro area, District Attorney Travis Sides raised pay as much as 18 percent for new prosecutors. “They still can’t get ’em,” says Raynes of the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council. “It’s always going to be hard to get a student from CU or the University of Denver [to move out]. Like, ‘Hey, you want to go to Burlington?’ That’s not their dream community, so they’re not going to give it a chance.”

The opportunity to work murder cases while his friends were spending their days handling misdemeanors lured Raymond Torrez to the public defender’s office in La Junta, an hour southeast of Pueblo. Nearly three decades later, he now leads the 14-person team, which covers more than 10,500 square miles, an area about the size of Massachusetts. “The main thing I cared about was practicing law, so an opportunity to do complicated, important work was the way for me to jump-start my career,” says the 53-year-old, who has an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and went to law school at CU. His wife is also an attorney in town. He knows he needs to put in overtime to keep his young lawyers happy: Torrez goes out for drinks with them after work; he’s hosted pool parties at his house; he’s offered to go house-hunting with them. “You want to help them make a connection here,” he says. But there’s only so much Torrez can do. One of his up-and-comers is a former college cheerleader who wants to stay active in the sport. “Not a lot of opportunities to coach cheer out here, though,” Torrez says.

“You have a chance to be this striving person out here, but you also have to acknowledge that the sorts of things available in rural areas are just different,” Erin Harris, a private attorney, told me one morning after juvenile court in Baca County. Harris grew up in La Junta, went to the University of Michigan’s Law School, became a lawyer in Chicago, and returned home after marrying a childhood friend. Now divorced and remarried, the 51-year-old formerly served as a deputy district attorney and Colorado Legal Services’ managing attorney. In addition to running her own private practice, she is currently La Junta’s city attorney.

Her area isn’t just a legal desert, she says, but also a service desert that lacks mental health facilities and domestic violence shelters. Her father was a physician in the region decades earlier and faced the same issues Harris faces now. “How do our communities recruit more professionals?” she asks. “How do you get an experienced attorney and convince that person’s family to come to a place like this? This is the conversation small towns across the country are having all the time. For people who choose this life, you have to figure out ways to make it work.”

I witnessed that sort of resourcefulness in Wray this past November. Fidler, the Alternate Defense Counsel–contracted attorney with an office in Burlington, was representing a client in a traffic case. The court had scheduled the woman’s guilty plea for January, but Fidler feared the timing would expose her to immigration-related issues under the new Trump administration because she wasn’t a citizen. Fidler doesn’t have a background in immigration law, and the closest expert was nearly three hours away in Denver. Fidler politely asked the Yuma County judge to move the plea hearing up to December, before Trump took office.

The judge, Wray’s former mayor and the owner of an agricultural fertilizer and pesticide business, was equally confounded. After a few moments of back-and-forth with Fidler, the judge finally came to his decision: He’d move the plea date to December. Fidler turned to his client. “You’re OK,” he said.

Though he wasn’t sure the woman would be safe following Trump’s inauguration, Fidler still thought he’d done something good—if only for a while. “You do your best with what you have,” he told me later.

After court at the fire station in Conejos County, Kelly raced for the parking lot. The district attorney had a trial scheduled at the Rio Grande County courthouse in Del Norte, a 50-mile drive from Antonito, and she already was running late. Kelly hauled her Jeep up the state highway and across rural, two-lane roads that bisected barren fields. She made a right turn at a mechanic’s shop, where a massive “Democrats Suck” flag flapped in the breeze. Fifteen minutes later, she pulled into town.

“This is the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my life,” Kelly said as she hustled up the courthouse steps. “Ever, ever, ever.” Residents in the 12th Judicial District formally elected her in November 2022, shortly after the governor appointed her to the job. Two years later, she ran unopposed, which made her feel like she had been accepted in the valley. Strangers in those days asked if she might find a husband here, if she was looking to buy some property—something she eventually did—anything that might make it harder for her to leave. “Someone said I need cattle,” Kelly told me as she opened the courtroom’s door. “What the heck do I know about raising cattle?”

The Rio Grande County courtroom is a long, broad keyhole with rows of wooden benches. Kelly was there to prosecute a teenager who’d allegedly threatened another teen. Kelly smiled when she saw the alleged victim seated with his parents, near a Del Norte police sergeant who’d helped the DA build her case. Kelly said some quick hellos and leaned into the group. “This is what we’re gonna try to do today,” she began.

Earlier that morning, as Kelly was driving to the fire station in Conejos County, she spoke to the victim’s father on her cell phone. The father had found additional evidence he thought the DA should know about. Kelly agreed the information was important to the case. Still, she was a little disappointed with herself. If this alleged crime had happened in Boulder, where she previously worked, one of the office’s many investigators would likely have uncovered the evidence months earlier. She would have had time to ask questions and create strategies with her staff. Instead, here in Rio Grande County, she was going to have to beg the judge for a last-second delay.

“We just need more time,” Kelly told the family as they sat in the courtroom. She pointed at the teenage victim, who wore a pressed dress shirt. “He looks like a good young man,” she said.

The hearing was brutal. Not only did District Judge Michael Gonzales admonish Kelly for requesting a delay, but he also noted the case had been ongoing for four months. These were children, he said, and they needed to move on with their lives. A public defender representing the defendant addressed the judge. “I’m concerned the district attorney’s office is not taking this case seriously,” the woman said. She asked for sanctions against Kelly, a penalty that could range from exclusion of evidence to dismissal of the case. The DA pursed her lips but didn’t look up from her laptop. Finally, when it was her turn to speak, Kelly shot from her chair. “I don’t like the word ‘sanction’ floating around,” she snapped. The judge called a brief recess. The defense’s team moved outside the courtroom. Kelly walked toward the victim’s parents. “Just so I’m clear,” she said, “we did nothing wrong.”

Gonzales acquiesced after the break. A sanction might be discussed in the future, but the judge’s tone had changed. With the trial postponed, Kelly thanked the judge and spoke to the teen’s family. Outside the courtroom a few minutes later, she hugged a sheriff’s department employee who’d recently been diagnosed with cancer. She talked to the Del Norte police sergeant. A sheriff’s lieutenant interrupted and asked how to get a court-ordered blood draw from a jail inmate who’d thrown urine at one of the deputies. “Communicable diseases and all that, ya know?” the lieutenant said.

Kelly eventually made it outside and into the afternoon sunlight. She was still steaming over the public defender’s demand for a sanction, which she saw as a cheap shot designed to embarrass her office. “That was garbage,” she said. But Kelly also knew the public defender had a legitimate complaint. If she had a bigger staff, someone would have caught the other potential evidence against the teenage defendant. Kelly would have been prepared for trial this afternoon—maybe earlier. In the rural 12th Judicial District, though, it seemed concessions always had to be made. “I’ve got 24 hours in my day,” she said. “This has been a lesson in patience, that’s for sure.” She took a breath and closed her eyes.

Kelly opened the Jeep’s door and dropped her bag on the passenger’s seat. It was almost 3:30 p.m., and there was more work to do. The drive to Alamosa would take 40 minutes, and she’d probably be on her phone the entire time. More meetings and phone calls waited at the office. There were at least 20 cases on her docket tomorrow, and she needed to prepare. Her staff had nine trials scheduled over the next month, and she was personally handling at least nine murder cases. At some point, Kelly would finally head home. She planned to work through the night.