Weiser’s record: A system falling behind

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Every time a convicted felon in Colorado decides to fight their case on appeal, the state has to answer. Homicide. Sexual assault. White collar crime. Death row. It doesn’t matter — the Attorney General’s Criminal Appeals Section picks up every one.

Thirty-four attorneys. Every felony appeal in the state.

And for three straight years, they haven’t been able to keep up.

The cost of that starts before a single case is decided.

The state tracks response briefs through mandatory SMART Act performance filings. One metric counts how many are overdue — cases where the office has not filed within the deadline set by the Colorado Appellate Rules. 

The Attorney General’s office sets its own annual target for how many of those overdue cases it will carry at year’s end. The backlog stood at 258 at the end of fiscal year 2023. By December 31, 2025, it was 468. That is 81 percent higher than three years ago and 52 percent above the office’s own target.

“It slows justice for everybody,” said Tom Raynes, executive director of the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council and a former deputy attorney general. “If we don’t have the attorneys available to get the appeals done and they’re just asking for delays with the court due to the shortage, that hurts everyone — whether it’s the defendant, the victims, the prosecutors.”

A March 2026 R Street Institute analysis of court delays described the broader costs of what Raynes is talking about — victims waiting longer for closure, witnesses going cold, the system spending resources on cases that won’t resolve. 

Raynes knows the office from the inside. He was deputy attorney general under Republican AG John Suthers from 2007 to 2010 and said the backlog has shadowed the Criminal Appeals Section across multiple administrations. Under Weiser it has grown 81 percent in three years.

The cases aren’t the problem

The obvious question is whether more appeals are driving this. The data says no.

Criminal appeal filings at the Court of Appeals have held roughly steady — between 813 and 926 per year across all four years in the data. The total criminal caseload pending at the court has declined since fiscal year 2023. In fiscal year 2024, the year the backlog reversed a strong prior performance and started climbing, there were fewer new criminal filings than the year before.

The court’s most recent annual statistical report, covering through calendar year 2024, shows where cases are getting stuck. Criminal direct appeals that hadn’t yet completed the briefing process grew by more than 20 percent in a single year. Cases that had finished briefing and were ready for a court opinion fell by nearly 40 percent over the same period.

When the Criminal Appeals Section filed more briefs in fiscal year 2023, the Court of Appeals issued 7.5 percent more cases than the year before. When case output fell in fiscal year 2024, opinions dropped 10.3 percent.

What everyone waits through

A defendant challenging a felony conviction waited an average of 1,077 days from filing to a Court of Appeals opinion in fiscal year 2023. This equates to nearly three years. By fiscal year 2024 that number had come down to 842 days.

Still over two years.

For victims, that timeline runs in parallel. The verdict that brought closure is under active legal challenge for the entire duration. Under Colorado’s Victim Rights Act, victims have the right to notification of all appellate proceedings — meaning an open appeal keeps them tied to a case that may feel far from resolved.

For those who believe they were wrongly convicted, the wait is something else entirely. A defendant who can show their conviction rested on flawed evidence or a constitutional error depends on the appellate process to correct it. Every overdue brief is a case where that correction — if it’s coming — is delayed. Some of those defendants are incarcerated while they wait.

Three years and counting

The section’s strongest performance in the available SMART Act data came in fiscal year 2023. The backlog fell 39.2 percent. Brief output hit its highest point. Then fiscal year 2024 arrived — and something changed. Neither Weiser nor his office has said publicly what it was.

In fiscal year 2024 briefs filed dropped to 652 — a 35 percent miss against the annual target of 1,000 and the section’s lowest output in the available data. The backlog grew by 84 overdue briefs. December 2024 budget documents noted a Senior Assistant Attorney General role in the unit sat vacant “with plans to fill the position.” The Department of Law did not respond to questions about the vacancy or what drove the decline.

Fiscal year 2025 brought partial recovery — 813 briefs filed, up from 652. The backlog still grew, adding 93 more overdue cases and reaching 435. The gap opened the prior year was too large for improved output alone to close.

The staffing picture

In December 2024 the Department of Law presented the Joint Budget Committee with a reduction option: cut four positions from the Appellate Unit — one Senior AAG and three fellows. The department’s own submission described the consequence. Eliminating them was “estimated to slow or reverse the Department’s progress in addressing the appellate caseload backlog.”

The legislature didn’t adopt the cut. Both the fiscal year 2024-25 and fiscal year 2025-26 Long Bills appropriated 41.6 full-time equivalent positions for the unit — flat across both years. Weiser’s office never asked for more. That same year the legislature passed SB25-024, adding 15 new judges to Colorado’s district and county courts over two years. The courts got more resources. The Criminal Appeals Section did not.

The record

At the January 8, 2025 oversight hearing, with the section’s worst output year in the available data on the table, Weiser told the legislature the Criminal Appeals Section was “already very stretched” and facing “a lot more work coming our way.” No backlog figures were presented. No legislator asked.

A year later — January 20, 2026 — with the backlog at 468 and climbing, Weiser mentioned the section once: “Our criminal appeals section represents felony prosecutions as they go on appeal.”

The clock

Somewhere in Colorado, a victim is waiting to know if the verdict that changed their life is going to hold. A defendant is waiting to know if the one that changed theirs was fair. Both of them are on the same clock — and that clock keeps running while 468 response briefs sit past due.

The Colorado Department of Law did not respond to questions for this article about what drove the fiscal year 2024 decline, the section’s current staffing level or the status of the Senior AAG vacancy.

This is the third in Weiser’s Record, a series examining the Department of Law’s mandatory performance filings. Read the first installment, The Lawsuit Machine and the Scorecard, and the second, 27,000 complaints, 17 settlements.