Colo. Supreme Court Issues New Directive to Reign in Rogue Distr. Courts' Censorship Policies

3 thoughts on “Colo. Supreme Court Issues New Directive to Reign in Rogue Distr. Courts’ Censorship Policies”

1. The sealing of court records, other than those involving a minor, serves only to cloak the abuses and corruption of the Colorado Judiciary and their court thespians just as refusing to respond to Congressional subpoenaes serves only to veil the sins of the current Administration. Similarly, the close-door operations of John Gleason and Richard Wehmhoefer serve only to protect the guilty, not the innocent.

   The absence of honest communication and transparency always breeds mistrust and contempt, and righteously so, and begs the question what are they trying to hide?  For individuals who have appeared in many Colorado courts the answer is obvious, corruption, and we want our records exposed.

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   1. The broad file access ban and discontinuation of statutorily mandated services like the ability to lodge a will with the court prior to the death of the testator (which is a BIG PROBLEM when you handle the probate of a dead lawyer with dozens of orginal Wills in his office, as I did shortly after the new policy came down), was motivated at the time largely by dramatic cuts in non-judge court staff that flowed from TABOR budget cuts.  Providing access to files requires non-judicial court staff and the goal was to free that staff up to handle cases.

      The other big motivator was a fear that unsupervised file access could be abused by identity thieves who could get SSNs and account numbers often found in divorce files and use that information to steal, near the height of worries about meth gangs engaging in that kind of conduct (the identity theft worry was real — I represented more than one client in JeffCo hit by the problem, but there was never any evidence that court files were a source).

      The problem, of course, is that courts are mandated to do certain things, like provide access to court files, and “I don’t want to spend money doing that” isn’t a very good reason not to do so.  Also, judicial staff levels have been almost restored to be cut levels, so that crisis that motivated the overbroad rule is over.

      There were more sensitive ways to handle the problem and I’m glad that the Colorado Supreme Court has done something about it.  But, the overreaction was more in the nature of indifference to public access rights when sensitivity was called for, rather than a scheme to cover up wrong doing.

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      1. I agree. And you can quote me on that!  I do not believe that the restrictions were motivated specifically by a desire to be secretive, although I think that many rogue judges would prefer to do their work in relative obscurity and welcome any pretext to further that end.  However, in this case, it was primarily a case of indifference, as you noted.  My comments about the in inability to monitor the conduct of judges and their court-appointed cronies was more of an observation about the actual and proximate consquence of the restriction policy, rather than the animus.

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