Colorado Chief Justice Brian Boatright; ethical troll

The state of Colorado unfortunately provided Brian Boatright with a law license in 1988 after he graduated from the University of Denver School of Law.

FYI: Former Governor John Hickenlooper was duped into appointing Brian as a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court in April 2011. Brian didn’t get the appointment because he was the most qualified attorney or jurist in Colorado. He received it because he had proven to be a reliable hack for the local politicians.

It should be noted that Brian has had his significant snout firmly implanted in the public trough for the past thirty-two (32) years. Apparently, no self-respecting law firm in the great Denver area was about to offer him a good paying job.

The Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline has found Brian, some of his colleagues, and the Judicial Department guilty of engaging in the following misconduct, all of which relates to an alleged contract-for-silence scheme.

• “The bottom line is this: Members of the Colorado Supreme Court, directly and through its senior staff, made a series of decisions and took a series of actions throughout 2021 and 2022 that limited the ability of the commission… to do its constitutionally mandated work.”
• “It chose delay, mixed messages and obfuscation.”
• “The Judicial Department blocked the commission’s efforts to investigate potential misconduct over the last two years, including by refusing to share records and documents, by stalling the commission’s requested funding and by circulating unfounded stories that cast doubt on the commission’s work.”
• “The overt actions of the leadership of the department [Justice] to promote publicly a specific narrative and avoid an impartial judicial discipline investigation themselves illustrate the depth of the flaws in the functionality and credibility of Colorado’s current system of judicial discipline that need to be remedied.”

Of course, Brian and those of his ilk in the Colorado Judiciary do not want any effective oversight of their conduct. They prefer to continue to leave investigations of judicial misconduct to be conducted by their brethren in the judiciary.

Limiting judges to issue determinations involving judicial misconduct, would be akin to passing a law that jurors selected to sit on a case involving an alleged pedophile would be limited to convicted pedophiles. I’m sure we all know what the verdict would be.

As we speak (ca. November 2022), Brain continues to dispense his so-called idea of jurisprudence as the Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.