A judge Gregory called conflicted denied his request for a conflict-free judge

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Christopher S.P. Gregory asked a Boulder judge to step aside, saying the judge was too conflicted to hear his case. The same judge decided the question, and on Oct. 22 he said no.

Gregory is the former executive director of Colorado’s judicial discipline commission who has spent two years trying to force accountability onto the state’s highest court. RMV reported last week that a federal judge threw out his lawsuit, that the state is seeking to hold him in contempt, and that he has opened a second front in Boulder County Court. Two rulings since then have gone against him.

The protection orders

On Oct. 1, Gregory filed 46 requests for civil protection orders in Boulder County Court in Longmont, naming Polis, Weiser, State Auditor Kerri Hunter, several Supreme Court justices, and dozens of other officials and attorneys. He said the officials were retaliating against him and tampering with witnesses, and he asked the court to bar them from further retaliation.

District Judge J. Keith Collins consolidated 42 of the cases and heard them together on Oct. 2. He denied all 42.

The judge found Gregory “has not met the burden” for a protection order, and that the conduct he described “does not fall within any of these five statutory purposes,” the categories of assault, domestic abuse, elder abuse, sexual violence, and stalking that the law covers. “All, or nearly all, of the alleged misconduct occurred while the Respondents were acting within the scope of their employment,” Collins ruled, according to the hearing transcript.

Collins added that he did not dispute Gregory “has experienced psychological and emotional stress,” but did not find the stress “was caused by illegal or otherwise prohibited conduct.”

The recusal fight

Before Collins ruled, Gregory had argued the judge should not be hearing the cases at all.

At the Oct. 2 hearing, Gregory told Collins that before taking the bench he had been law partners with the former head of a state attorney-regulation body he called “central to the issues” in the cases, and that Collins later sat on a judicial ethics board whose handling of a separate discipline case Gregory had overseen as commission director. Collins denied the recusal request from the bench, saying the law did not require him to “disclose the process, and conversations, and considerations of the judges, in determining whether or not they had a conflict.”

On Oct. 22, Gregory tried again. In his case against Weiser, he filed a “Petition for Rehearing by a Conflict-Free and Impartial Judge,” asking that the denial be reheard by a judge without a conflict. His filing listed what he called at least six independent grounds for Collins to step aside, including that the judge is “a material witness” to the matters Gregory has alleged and that he “permitted intervention by the Attorney General notwithstanding conflicts.”

Collins denied that petition the same day. The order carries a single stamp. “DENIED BY COURT.”

How the cases were assigned

The assignment of Gregory’s cases has drawn unusual attention from the bench.

The 20th Judicial District’s chief judge, Nancy Salomone, disqualified the district’s judges from some of Gregory’s cases through what she called a “Bench Recusal Order,” then reassigned them to Collins and a senior judge, Steven Sletta. Collins recused himself from two of the cases, and two others went to a visiting judge, but he kept the rest.

Gregory told the court the split made no sense, since the cases all share “identical fact patterns, identical pleadings.” If a conflict applied to one, he argued, it applied to all.

Collins disagreed on the record. “I don’t think that a conflict in one case would be applicable to all,” he said.

What the Attorney General’s office is doing

The officials Gregory named are represented by Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office, including Weiser himself, who is a defendant in Gregory’s federal case.

Gregory has objected to that arrangement throughout, arguing Weiser cannot represent other defendants while he is himself a defendant in a related suit. In the Boulder cases, Weiser’s office intervened through the discipline commission to seek sealing of Gregory’s filings, the same relief the state won in his federal case and in two Denver District Court actions.

The fight continues

Gregory keeps fighting these cases, he says, to hold the justices accountable for what he describes in sworn testimony as a years-long pattern of retaliation against him for pursuing their discipline.

In 2023, a special tribunal publicly censured former Chief Justice Nathan Coats over a multi-million-dollar contract with a former chief of staff in the state court administrator’s office, the contract that sits at the origin of Gregory’s complaints. That censure is on the record.

Gregory told the court he intends to keep going. After Collins denied the protection orders on Oct. 2, he said he would seek disqualification and a rehearing “by a conflict-free judge.” He filed a disqualification motion days later and the rehearing petition on Oct. 22. Collins denied the petition the same day.