Weiser’s record: The special prosecution paradox

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

When a serial killer was working his way through the San Luis Valley, Anne Kelly’s eight-lawyer office needed help. She didn’t call the Attorney General.

“That case was certainly a prime case for which the attorney general’s office could have assisted,” said Kelly, the 12th Judicial District DA whose office covers six rural counties in southern Colorado. “Instead, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office sent a crew of people upon the request of the district attorney and handled that case from start to finish. And that was really the only reason why that case was as successful as it was.”

The case was against Adre Baroz, known as “Psycho,” sentenced in May 2024 for five murders in the San Luis Valley. He is serving five life sentences plus 140 years.

Boulder went. The AG’s Special Prosecution Unit didn’t.

Kelly said the pattern isn’t unique to that case. “The rural jurisdictions, our first call is to other offices rather than the attorney general’s office, because in my mind, they just haven’t prioritized assisting rural jurisdictions.” She added that the AG’s office has helped when asked, but that priorities — not availability — are the issue.

The state tracks the Special Prosecution Unit’s output through mandatory SMART Act performance filings. The target: 75 cases filed per year. The actual numbers tell a different story.

The unit is growing. The work isn’t.

The Special Prosecution Unit exists for exactly the situation Kelly described. A rural DA with limited staff faces a complex homicide, a public corruption case, an organized crime investigation. The SP Unit steps in. That’s the design.

In fiscal year 2023-24, the unit filed 90 cases. That was the best year in the available record — above its own target of 75 for the first time. The following year, cases filed dropped to 55. Through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025-26, according to internal case activity records obtained through a Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act request, the unit has filed 12 cases. Annualized, that puts the full year on pace for roughly 16 — about 20 percent of the target.

The records reveal something else. The unit didn’t shrink. It grew.

In fiscal year 2023-24, the Special Prosecution Unit had 35.0 filled full-time equivalent positions and a budget of $5.95 million. The following year — as cases filed fell from 90 to 55 — the unit added more than four FTE and nearly $800,000 in additional funding, reaching 39.3 FTE and $6.73 million. The fiscal year 2025-26 Long Bill appropriated 46.4 FTE and $6.66 million — the highest staffing level in the available record.

Tom Raynes, executive director of the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council and a former deputy attorney general, put it this way. “Most DA’s will tell you we’ve seen a drop-off in the availability of getting that rural assistance.” Raynes attributed the drop-off to funding and staffing strain rather than to the office’s priorities — a distinction Kelly draws differently.

The decline isn’t limited to cases filed. DA consultations — requests from local prosecutors for advice and case support that don’t always result in formal filings — fell from 403 in fiscal year 2021-22 to 216 in fiscal year 2024-25. Both metrics are moving in the same direction.

The Department of Law did not respond to questions submitted for this article about what accounts for the gap between the unit’s staffing growth and its declining case output. Questions were submitted May 11 with a deadline of May 13.

Who fills the gap

“The idea of a special prosecution unit is absolutely necessary for places like the San Luis Valley,” Kelly said, “because there’s not a lot of resources down here. We have eight lawyers in our office. And so taking on a major case is oftentimes challenging given our resources.”

Kelly described leaning on metro-area DA offices for major cases. Raynes said the problem compounds when rural districts lose their elected DA — when a vacancy occurs, by statute the Governor assigns the AG to run the office temporarily, which pulls from the SP Unit’s already limited capacity. Three rural district attorneys left their posts between March and October 2024: Christian Champagne of the 6th Judicial District, Joshua Vogel of the 15th Judicial District, and Seth Ryan of the 7th Judicial District, who cited a 56 percent attorney turnover rate in his office in 2024 in his resignation letter. Each vacancy created a new demand on the same statewide resource.

Christian Champagne was the 6th Judicial District DA until March 2024, when, term-limited, he left for what the Durango Herald later reported was a senior counsel position at the Department of Law coordinating rural prosecution assistance. Both Raynes and Kelly described him as effective in that role but, in Kelly’s words, “restrained by the priorities of the office in general.” The Department of Law did not confirm his current responsibilities when asked.

Sean Murray, appointed as 6th Judicial District DA after Champagne’s departure, described the SP Unit as helpful and responsive. “They have generally been available to help with cases,” he said, noting assistance on a cold homicide case and complex contractor disputes. He added that he has no basis to assess whether statewide case numbers reflect broader trends in his district.

Murray replaced the man who now coordinates the unit’s rural outreach. His district’s experience may not be typical.

The pipeline problem

The challenge runs deeper than any single case. Rural prosecutor offices struggle to recruit attorneys to begin with — and when they find them, keeping them is its own battle.

“The bottom line for rural prosecutors is that oftentimes we’re asking lawyers to come and live in places that are not as attractive as other places in the state,” Kelly said. “A young lawyer coming out of law school would more than likely choose Denver or Boulder than Alamosa. I have lawyers that I’ve recruited from Louisiana and North Carolina, Oklahoma.”

Raynes described the same dynamic across the state. Rural offices are competing against metro salaries, metro amenities and metro career paths — and losing. The fellowship program the AG’s office runs was designed to bridge that gap, placing law graduates in rural offices for a year to seed the pipeline. According to Raynes, it has been unfunded for three to four years.

The Colorado General Assembly passed SB25-067 last year to restructure the program. Rather than placing individual fellows in rural offices, the bill provides direct funding to rural DA offices to recruit and hire their own deputy DAs — a structure that reflects what prosecutors like Kelly have already been doing out of necessity. Governor Polis signed it April 7, 2025. It took effect August 6, 2025. 

According to Raynes, the fellowship still has not been funded.

What the attorney general is doing instead

Kelly framed it as a question of priorities. “When you’re spending all of your time prosecuting federal cases against federal government agents and corporations and things like that — which is a really important function of the attorney general’s office — I think you lose sight of the fact that the attorney general is the state’s prosecutor. And so rural communities like ours really need that kind of assistance and really need that strong partnership with the attorney general’s office.”

At the January 8, 2025 Joint Judiciary Committee hearing, Weiser thanked the committee for approving SP Unit rural hires the prior year. “We asked for a couple more personnel, and you approved of it,” he said. “And we’re proud to say we’re now working better with the RDA — rural district attorneys — partners because of it.” The unit’s budget grew from $5.95 million to $6.73 million. FTE grew from 35.0 to 39.3. Cases filed fell from 90 to 55.

Weiser returned to the committee a year later, on January 20, 2026, and addressed rural prosecution directly. He told legislators he “was pleased to be given additional FTE” to support the work and that “we’ve now been able to hire” and provide support “that is making a difference.” Weiser cited three cases he attributed to the unit: a homicide prosecution in Pueblo, a child abuse death in Cortez and a double homicide in Delta. In all three, he said, local law enforcement told him they could not have handled those prosecutions without the unit’s help. The FTE he referenced had grown further still — to 46.4 positions for fiscal year 2025-26, the highest level in the available record, with total funding of $7.64 million. Through the first nine months of that fiscal year, the unit filed 12 cases.

The internal records obtained for this article show the Department of Law tracks case activity monthly. The month-by-month data shows no period of recovery. Nine months into the current fiscal year, with the most staff and funding in the unit’s available record, the pace has not reversed.

Somewhere in rural Colorado, a DA with eight lawyers is looking at a complex case on her desk. Her first call isn’t to the attorney general. That’s the part the numbers can’t fully capture — not just what the unit has filed, but the ones that never reach it at all.

The Colorado Department of Law did not respond to questions submitted for this article, including what accounts for the decline in cases filed, what the unit’s staffing growth reflects if not increased output, and whether the Department tracks the reasons consultations have declined. A Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act request for full case-by-case district breakdowns was filed April 22 and produced aggregate data only.

This is the fourth 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, the second, 27,000 complaints, 17 settlements, and the third, A system falling behind.