69 results for 'court:"Colorado Supreme Court"'.
J. Marquez, in this interlocutory review, finds the trial court properly suppressed inculpatory statements made by defendant. Accused of sexually assaulting his granddaughter, defendant's statements were elicited during a custodial interrogation without proper Miranda warnings. The court's ruling provided an independent basis for suppression and was not challenged on appeal. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: December 18, 2023, Case #: 23SA187, Categories: Miranda, Sex Offender, Child Victims
J. Marquez upholds the lower court's suppression of defendant's incriminating statements, made during a police interview, in connection with the state's case against him for his alleged sexual assault of his granddaughter over a 10-year period. The state's failure to address each of the trial court's reasons for suppression, including the involuntary nature of the statements and whether defendant was in custody at the time of the interview, requires the decision to be upheld. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: December 18, 2023, Case #: 2023CO62, Categories: Criminal Procedure, Miranda, Self Incrimination
J. Berkenkotter finds the trial court properly granted defendant's motion for sanctions against the prosecutor's office and reduced the charge of first-degree murder to second-degree murder. Evidence clearly indicated an ongoing pattern of misconduct that included unreasonable delays or an outright refusal to produce discovery materials in several cases, including the one at issue. Because defendant's attorney was prevented from adequately analyzing the majority of the material, he was clearly prejudiced by the behavior and sanctions were warranted. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Berkenkotter, Filed On: December 11, 2023, Case #: 2023CO61, Categories: Murder, Sanctions, Discovery
J. Gabriel finds the lower court termination of its jurisdiction over the child welfare case for the county's failure to prosecute precluded it from ruling on the ombudsman's request for production of an unredacted agency report; therefore, the court improperly disclosed the document, especially considering it dealt mainly with accusations of favoritism within the county's board of commissioners and was not relevant to the child welfare case. The ombudsman's request was entirely outside the scope of previous filings in the case and, therefore, did not deal with the court's continuing jurisdiction over already settled matters, which requires the ombudsman to destroy all copies of the report.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Gabriel, Filed On: December 4, 2023, Case #: 2023CO60, Categories: Family Law, Public Record, Jurisdiction
J. Hood finds the trial court properly capped the bond amount at $25 million and denied the prevailing party's request for additional security at the conclusion of the trial. The state of Colorado's $25 million cap on supersedeas bonds is not unconstitutional. Although it overlaps with this court's rule requiring a liable party to post a bond worth 125 percent of the damages award, that rule is not mandatory and allows a trial court to order any bond amount, which reconciles any conflict between the two. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hood, Filed On: December 4, 2023, Case #: 2023CO59, Categories: Constitution, Damages, Contract
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J. Marquez finds the appeals court properly granted the production companies' motion for summary judgment in a oil and gas lease dispute. A 4-month stoppage in oil production at several wells for necessary repairs to a sales pipeline did not trigger the termination clauses in the leases between the production companies and the landowners. The wells remained commercially viable during the shutdown and were still capable of production under the terms of the leases. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: November 20, 2023, Case #: 2023CO58, Categories: Property, Contract
J. Samour finds the lower court properly granted the father's motion for an in-camera inspection of certain requested discovery documents. The log provided by the county contained little-to-no detail about the contents of the documents, which prevented the court from adequately analyzing its claim of attorney-client privilege. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Samour, Filed On: November 14, 2023, Case #: 2023CO57, Categories: Family Law, Discovery, Privilege
J. Hood finds the appeals court erroneously overturned the jury's verdict in favor of the rescuer. Although the assailant's theft of the cab and subsequent vehicular assault may have seemed unusual, it was within the scope of foreseeability and part of a single course of conduct that rendered the cab company liable for the rescuer's injuries.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hood, Filed On: November 14, 2023, Case #: 2023CO56, Categories: Tort, Negligence
J. Hart finds the trial court improperly suppressed the results of blood testing prior to defendant's trial on DUI charges. The results were not yet available when it made its ruling, which was not supported by any credible evidence and was made before a trial date had been set. The testing lab, a state agency over which the prosecution has no control, had not yet provided the results at the time of the court's decision to suppress, which could only be made if evidence proved the delay was unreasonable. Reversed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hart, Filed On: October 23, 2023, Case #: 2023CO55, Categories: Evidence, Dui, Discovery
J. Hart finds that while the county has a legally protected interest in oil and gas wells in its boundaries, the lower court properly dismissed its claims against the Department of Public Health. The increase in inspections to prevent leaks and reduce emissions does not constitute a concrete injury and, therefore, the county lacks standing to bring its claims. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hart, Filed On: October 16, 2023, Case #: 2023CO54, Categories: Civil Procedure, Environment, Jurisdiction
J. Hood finds defendant and all other individuals have a protected privacy interest in their internet search history, even when revealed only by IP address and not name; therefore, law enforcement officials are required to include exact information when they submit a search warrant for such information. Therefore, in this case, the government's search warrant parameters, which included Google searches for a specific address involved in a suspected arson that had been searched for within 15 days of the crime, satisfied Fourth Amendment requirements and allowed the court to issue the warrant. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hood, Filed On: October 16, 2023, Case #: 2023CO53, Categories: Constitution, Search, Arson
J. Marquez finds the political subdivision doctrine used to determine whether a subsidiary of a government agency has standing to sue the agency will be abandoned in future cases, given that it created needless confusion and had significant overlap with the standard test used by courts to qualify a party's standing to file suit. Meanwhile, the lower court in this case properly dismissed the school district's lawsuit even in the absence of the subdivision doctrine because none of the State Board of Education's actions during its investigation of the district's leadership hindered its ability to serve its students or qualified as a concrete injury. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: October 16, 2023, Case #: 2023CO52, Categories: Civil Procedure, Education, Government
J. Samour finds defendant's right to a jury trial was not violated, as the recidivism portion of Colorado's animal cruelty criminal statute is not an element of the offense required to be proven to the jury but is, in fact, a sentence enhancement to be proved to the trial court by a preponderance of the evidence. Although it elevates convictions from misdemeanors to felonies, the recidivism portion stands alone from the subsection of the statute that lists elements of animal cruelty and does not radically increase punishment for a defendant. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Samour, Filed On: October 3, 2023, Case #: 2023CO50, Categories: Criminal Procedure, Sentencing, Animal Cruelty
J. Samour finds a criminal defendant is not entitled to a jury trial on the recidivist portion of the sex offender registry statute, which is merely a sentence enhancement required to be proven to the trial court by a preponderance of the evidence. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Samour, Filed On: October 3, 2023, Case #: 2023CO51, Categories: Sentencing, Sex Offender
J. Boatright finds that because several Colorado laws related to health care employees who report suspected drug thefts provide immunity only to persons, the trial court properly denied the employer's request to dismiss the employee's defamation and emotional distress claims after she was falsely accused of taking patients' prescription medications. The three laws under which the supervisor was granted immunity repeatedly use the word "individual" to describe covered persons, which prevents application of immunity to a corporation. Furthermore, while the duty to report statute allows for corporate immunity, the law requires facilities to report suspected thefts only to law enforcement; therefore, the employer's reporting to its board of directors violated the statute and prevented immunity. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Boatright, Filed On: September 25, 2023, Case #: 2023CO49, Categories: Employment, Health Care, Immunity
J. Berkenkotter finds the lower court properly denied the mother's motion to remove the child from family services' custody. "Due diligence," as defined in the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, requires the party petitioning for custody of a child to make reasonable efforts to determine whether that child has any Native American heritage, which was satisfied in this case when family services repeatedly attempted to contact the child's mother and eventually confirmed from the child's maternal grandmother he had no Native American heritage. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Berkenkotter, Filed On: September 11, 2023, Case #: 2023 CO 48, Categories: Civil Procedure, Family Law, Native Americans
J. Boatright upholds the court of appeals decision the post-conviction court properly refused to grant defendant relief after he pleaded guilty to menacing. So long as a criminal defendant's Alford plea is voluntary, knowing and intelligent, a trial court is not required to make a strong finding of actual evidence of guilt to accept the plea because making such a finding is merely one way, and not the only way, a court can determine whether a plea is legitimate and constitutional. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Boatright, Filed On: September 11, 2023, Case #: 2023 CO 46, Categories: Evidence, Plea, Menacing
J. Gabriel finds the lower court erroneously declined to extend the litigation privilege to attorneys representing a class of employees at a beauty salon. Conditioning privilege on whether attorneys have made sufficient allegations that a class is ascertainable would improperly limit privilege, especially in cases like this, where the attorneys made public statements to sound out class members prior to obtaining business records from the employer. Therefore, because all of the allegedly defamatory statements about the employer's business practices bore some relationship to the suit, they were protected by privilege. Reversed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Gabriel, Filed On: September 11, 2023, Case #: 2023 CO 47, Categories: Discovery, Privilege, Class Action
J. Gabriel vacates the lower court's ruling on the merits of property tax legislation and its constitutionality. The legislation will not take effect until and unless it is approved by Colorado voters in the 2023 election cycle; therefore, this and all other courts lack jurisdiction to consider whether the legislation complies with the state's single subject requirement.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Gabriel, Filed On: August 21, 2023, Case #: 2023CO45, Categories: Constitution, Elections, Jurisdiction
Per curiam, the Special Tribunal of the Supreme Court of Colorado finds that former Chief Justice Nathan Coats will be publicly censured for his failure to properly perform administrative duties and, specifically, allow contract negotiations between the judicial department and an employee under investigation for falsification of an expense invoice. Even though Coats was contacted by both the attorney general and the state auditor about allegations raised in several emails, he failed to notify those offices about a multimillion-dollar contract offer extended to the employee, who had resigned under threat of termination. However, because Coats cooperated with the investigation of the tribunal, no fees or costs will be assessed to him.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Per curiam, Filed On: August 7, 2023, Case #: 2023 CO 44, Categories: Government, Judiciary, Attorney Discipline
J. Samour finds that the district court should not have suppressed the results of a blood test that showed defendant was under the influence of THC when he crashed into a driver who was fixing a flat tire and severed his legs. The investigation into the collision was still underway and had not transformed into an arrest when he consented to a blood draw, so the blood sample should not be suppressed because it was not obtained during an arrest that was unsupported by probable cause. Reversed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Samour, Filed On: June 26, 2023, Case #: 23SA69, Categories: Search, Dui
J. Hart finds that defendant's double jeopardy protections were not violated when he was tried for a murder after having been acquitted in Mexico. The cooperation of Colorado authorities in the Mexican prosecution did not bar the application of the dual-sovereignty doctrine to his prosecution in Colorado since the cooperation did not meet the threshold of control that would make the Mexican prosecution a tool of Colorado's jurisdiction. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hart, Filed On: June 20, 2023, Case #: 21SC473, Categories: Murder, Double Jeopardy
J. Samour finds that the trial court erred in automatically excluding defendant's hearsay statement because it was self-serving. Self-serving hearsay is subject to the regular exceptions to the bar on hearsay. Defendant's hearsay statement that he thought his alleged victim had given him permission to have sex with her was admissible under the excited utterance exception, as he made the statement when she startled him by accusing him of rape. And the statement had probative value since it directly undermines the state's evidence. Reversed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Samour, Filed On: June 20, 2023, Case #: 21SC771, Categories: Evidence, Sex Offender
J. Marquez finds that the trial court properly dismissed a civil claim under the Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Act for alleged misconduct for which other legal claims were time-barred. The Act creates a new cause of action for conduct that happened before the Act and for which other claims have been time-barred, which violates the retrospectivity clause of the Colorado Constitution. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: June 20, 2023, Case #: 22SC824, Categories: Negligence
J. Boatright finds that the appeals court was right that the state misled the jury by redacting statements that defendant made to police investigating a drunken driver report. Under the rule of completeness, claims he made about a woman driving his truck should have been admitted. And admitting the statements does not open up defendant to impeachment based on cross examination about previous DUI convictions.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Boatright, Filed On: June 20, 2023, Case #: 21SC506, Categories: Evidence, Dui
J. Gabriel finds that the district court improperly classified defendant's first-degree murder charge as a capital offense and denied his request for bail. The charge was filed after the enactment of legislation abolishing the death penalty, and the term "capital offenses" refers to crimes punishable by death, so the application of the capital offense exception to the constitutional right to bail was error. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Gabriel, Filed On: June 20, 2023, Case #: 23SA2, Categories: Death Penalty, Murder, Bail
J. Boatright finds that the trial court properly admitted hearsay statements that a child made about alleged unlawful sexual behavior because the child was under 18 when she made them. Also, the appeals court correctly determined that for the crime of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, the child hearsay statute applies to any victim under the age of 18. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Boatright, Filed On: June 12, 2023, Case #: 21SC340, Categories: Confrontation, Sex Offender, Child Victims
J. Marquez finds that the trial court violated defendant's constitutional right to present a defense by refusing to allow a nonparty alternate suspect to be questioned in the presence of the jury hearing her burglary case. The trial court should have held a hearing outside the jury's presence before refusing defendant's request. Overturning its previous decision in Dikeman, the court holds that a defendant may question a nonparty alternate suspect in front of a jury even if the nonparty intends to assert the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. First, a trial court must decide if a non-speculative connection exists between the nonparty alternate suspect and the subject crime, whether the nonparty has a valid Fifth Amendment claim and, if so, what limits should be placed on courtroom questioning to avoid drama. Reversed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Marquez, Filed On: June 12, 2023, Case #: 21SC458, Categories: Burglary, Criminal Procedure, Dna
J. Boatright finds that the trial court properly admitted video of a forensic interview of a victim under the child hearsay statute. For the crime of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, the child hearsay statute applies to any victim under the age of 18. But the trial court must revisit the imposition of concurrent sentences since the offenses did not involve the same supporting evidence. Reversed in part.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Boatright, Filed On: June 12, 2023, Case #: 21SC325, Categories: Confrontation, Sex Offender, Child Victims
J. Hood finds that the trial court properly suppressed defendant's confession to killing a man because the state failed to prove he had voluntarily waived his Miranda rights. Detectives befriended defendant, a homeless teenager, before making affirmative misrepresentations that he would walk out of the police station that day and that the Miranda warning was just a formality, which, combined with the timing of the misrepresentations, made his waiver involuntary. Affirmed.
Court: Colorado Supreme Court, Judge: Hood, Filed On: June 12, 2023, Case #: 22SA350, Categories: Miranda, Murder