Disciplined judges, after stepping down, show up in municipal courts

By DAVID MIGOYA | The Gazette via Denver Gazette

Not long after 18th Judicial District Judge Natalie Chase resigned over a series of inappropriate racial remarks, she was back on the bench — as a municipal judge in tiny Deer Trail and as a traffic referee in Fort Collins.

Despite a public censure by the state’s judicial discipline commission and her resignation in April 2021, Chase landed the part-time jobs within a few months and held them simultaneously for the next three years, according to payroll records from both locations obtained by The Denver Gazette.

Chase is one of at least a half-dozen jurists who resigned or retired in the past decade over discipline issues they faced, nearly all of them private sanctions the public never knew about, then reappeared in another lower-level courtroom on the public payroll, The Denver Gazette has learned.

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