Case dismissed, Gregory now faces contempt and asks a judge to prosecute Colorado’s justices

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

The former director of Colorado’s judicial discipline commission spent years trying to force accountability onto the state’s highest court. A federal judge has now thrown out his lawsuit, and the state wants him held in contempt.

Christopher S.P. Gregory sued the Colorado Supreme Court, the state’s judicial discipline bodies, Gov. Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser, and dozens of individual officials in October 2025. RMV first reported on the suit in March, when it was still pending. The complaint has since been dismissed, and the fight has turned on Gregory himself.

On Aug. 11, U.S. Senior District Judge Kathryn H. Vratil dismissed the complaint in full. The Clerk entered final judgment the same day.

Why the case was thrown out

Vratil, a Kansas judge assigned to the case after Gregory tried to disqualify the Colorado-based judges, dismissed the suit on three grounds.

The Colorado Supreme Court and the two discipline bodies were shielded by sovereign immunity. Certain discipline officials had absolute immunity for their judicial or quasi-judicial work. The individual defendants, including Polis and Weiser, were entitled to qualified immunity on the federal claims.

And the claims themselves, Vratil found, did not hold together. 

Gregory alleged he was fired as executive director in retaliation for reporting judicial misconduct. The court found he never pleaded what specific speech got him fired, or that it fell outside his job running the very commission that investigates misconduct.

The order noted Gregory attached more than 3,700 pages of exhibits to his complaint and cited them without explanation. The court declined to comb through them.

With the federal claims gone, the court declined to exercise jurisdiction over Gregory’s remaining state-law claims and dismissed them without prejudice, meaning he can refile them in state court.

The move to reopen

Gregory did not accept the ruling. On Sept. 8, he moved to vacate the judgment under Rule 59(e), arguing Vratil was personally biased against him and that her dismissal was “structural error.”

He filed the motion with his co-counsel, Ingrid DeFranco. Gregory is a licensed Colorado attorney, and he has increasingly carried the case himself.

The defendants, represented by the Attorney General’s office, oppose it. 

In a Sept. 22 response, they argued the structural-error doctrine applies only to criminal cases, and that Gregory was trying to relitigate a recusal request the court had already denied. He identified no legal or factual error in the dismissal, they wrote, just unhappiness with losing.

The contempt fight

The sharper turn came over what Gregory attached to that motion.

Back in March, Vratil had ordered that any filing Gregory made mentioning state or federal judges be filed under restriction. 

The reason was that an earlier affidavit he filed publicly contained confidential information about internal judicial discipline proceedings, material he learned as a commission insider and that Colorado law requires be kept confidential.

The two exhibits he attached to his motion to vacate ran about 1,650 pages. The defendants said they included sealed material, filed in the open in violation of the restriction order. On Sept. 9, they asked the court to seal the exhibits and hold Gregory in contempt.

Vratil acted the same day. She struck the two exhibits, placed them under restriction, and ordered Gregory to show cause why he should not be held in civil contempt. She also directed him to explain why he should not be sanctioned under Rule 11 for filing them, as she put it, for an “improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay or needlessly increase the costs of litigation.”

Both the contempt question and the motion to vacate are now fully briefed and sitting before the judge.

A second front

Gregory has not confined the fight to federal court.

On Oct. 1, he filed a declaration in Boulder County Court asking a judge to appoint a special prosecutor and bring criminal charges against Polis, Weiser, State Auditor Kerri Hunter, the Supreme Court justices, and others. 

He invoked Colorado statute, C.R.S. § 16-5-209, that lets a judge order prosecution or appoint a special prosecutor after finding that a district attorney’s refusal to charge was “arbitrary or capricious and without reasonable excuse.” Gregory says he tried to report his allegations to Longmont police and that the local district attorney directed police not to investigate.

The declaration was one of 46 related complaints Gregory filed in Boulder County Court on Oct. 1, according to a motion from the Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline. 

On Oct. 6, the commission, represented by a senior assistant attorney general from Weiser’s office, asked the court to seal those filings and to require Gregory to file anything discussing Colorado judicial discipline under suppression first. It was the same relief the state had already won in his federal case and in two Denver District Court actions.

The Boulder cases have already drawn unusual attention from the bench. 

On Oct. 1, the chief judge of the 20th Judicial District, Nancy Salomone, issued what she called a “Bench Recusal Order” disqualifying the district’s judges from some of Gregory’s cases, which were then reassigned to two other judges. 

On Oct. 13, Gregory filed a motion asking the court to disqualify those judges too and to have the Colorado Supreme Court form a special tribunal to hear his cases.

The declaration also describes something else now running in parallel. 

Gregory says he and DeFranco face an attorney discipline grievance brought through the Supreme Court’s regulation counsel. For a former discipline director who spent years pressing complaints against others, it is a notable reversal.

One exhibit Gregory filed shows how the Commission handled him from the inside. 

In a letter dismissing one of his requests to evaluate a judge, the Commission’s executive director reminded him that, “as you are aware from your prior role as Executive Director,” such matters are confidential and the Commission could not act on it.

What is established, and what is not

One piece of all this is settled. In 2023, a special tribunal publicly censured former Chief Justice Nathan Coats over a multi-million-dollar contract with a former state court administrator, a contract that sat at the origin of Gregory’s complaints. That censure is on the record.

The rest is contested. 

The allegations in Gregory’s filings are his sworn claims. The court dismissed his federal claims on jurisdictional and pleading grounds, without a trial on the underlying misconduct allegations. 

The officials he names have not answered those allegations in the Boulder proceeding, and Gregory says the district attorney declined to investigate.

Reached for comment, Gregory said his filings speak for themselves and pointed to what he called judicial bias as the real story. 

“The issue that needs to be reported on is the overt judicial bias that has occurred in this case,” he wrote. He said a default had been entered against the defendants before the case was reassigned to Vratil, which he described as a move made “with the pre-determined objective of setting aside the default and ultimately dismissing the cases.” 

He said he intends to petition the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Attorney General’s office did not respond by deadline.