*All charges have been dropped against the Black ranchers in Colorado who went viral after they were called racist by their neighbors and the local sheriff’s department.
El Paso County prosecutors have dropped all criminal charges against Courtney and Nicole Mallery, who were charged in February with felony stalking, tampering with a utility meter and petty theft related to a dispute with a neighbor in the small town of Yoder, reports the Denver Post. Their case drew national headlines and was closely watched by advocacy and civil rights organizations, as well as Colorado lawmakers.
Howard Black, a spokesperson for the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office, said a “public criminal record does not exist with respect to these defendants who are the subject of the sealed record.” He would not comment further.
The ranchers’ story went viral after a pair of articles raised concerns about potential civil rights violations. The Mallerys said white neighbors were poisoning their animals, destroying their property and threatening them with guns, though nobody has been arrested in connection with the couple’s allegations. They also alleged El Paso County sheriff’s deputies were downplaying their complaints due to their race and were in cahoots with neighbors to drive them off their land.
Nicole Mallery still awaits a review hearing for a protection order, and the couple’s legal team said they haven’t ruled out a potential lawsuit.
“We are pleased with this outcome and recognize the district attorney’s office for reaching this conclusion,” the couple’s attorneys, Tyrone Glover, Matthew Roche and Jeremy Loew, said in a statement Thursday. “While justice has been served today, the fight for individual, law enforcement and prosecutorial accountability are far from over.”
“We implore the district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices to conduct more thorough front-end investigations before filing charges, to minimize injustices such as these in the future and to ensure the criminally accused are afforded due process of law,” the attorneys said in the statement.
Amid public pressure, the sheriff’s office released dozens of hours of body-camera footage and hundreds of pages of reports. According to the Denver Post, the documents and video evidence painted a much more complicated picture and often contradicted the Mallerys’ story of law enforcement abuse.
The Denver Post reports: “The situation appeared to be in part a neighborly dispute that spiraled out of control, evidenced by hundreds of calls for service by the Mallerys and other community members, accusing one another of tampering with cameras, watching each other’s movements and violating a laundry list of protection orders. The calls came in so frequently from all sides that El Paso County deputies, in their reports, appeared to grow increasingly fed up with the situation — even encouraging neighbors to move for their own peace of mind.”
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