Gregory asks Colorado to evaluate all 122 judges on the 2026 retention ballot

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Christopher S.P. Gregory has spent two years trying to force accountability onto Colorado’s courts. His latest filing asks the state’s judicial discipline commission to evaluate the conduct of every judge standing for retention.

Gregory, the former executive director of the Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline, filed the request Nov. 1. RMV has reported on his fight with the state’s courts, which has produced a dismissed federal lawsuit and a contempt threat, and a string of denied motions in Boulder County.

The new filing is a request for evaluation, or RFE, the form the public uses to ask the commission to evaluate a judge’s conduct for possible discipline. This one names every judge on the 2026 retention ballot, from Supreme Court Justice William Hood III down through county court judges across the state.

Gregory frames the stakes around voters. His RFE says the judges “knowingly made material omissions by failing to object” to performance evaluations he calls “legally inadequate, misleading, and incomplete,” and that their silence left voters uninformed as ballots went out. Whether the evaluations fell short in any way that broke a rule is what the rest of the filing tries to establish.

What the request alleges

Gregory’s claim is that the judges standing for retention stayed silent about a problem he says he has been raising for months.

His lead request is that the commission and its staff step aside and let the Colorado Supreme Court form a conflict-free special tribunal to hear the case, a move he says the constitution requires. The RFE asks the commission to disqualify itself and to exclude from any tribunal the district and appeals court judges named in the filing.

He sued the state’s judicial performance commissions in July, arguing they published their 2026 evaluations without weighing judicial “integrity.” A Colorado law requires the commissions to consider integrity, and Gregory says they skipped it. His RFE says that not one judge up for retention objected to those evaluations, and that their silence amounts to concealing information from voters.

“Not a single judge subject to retention came forward to object to the legal adequacy, accuracy, and completeness of the 2026 judicial performance evaluation reports,” Gregory wrote.

His theory rests on a single rule. Canon Rule 4.1(A)(11) of the judicial conduct code bars a judge standing for retention from making a “false or misleading” statement, and a comment to the rule extends that to statements that “omit facts necessary to make the communication considered as a whole not materially misleading.” Gregory reads the judges’ silence about the evaluations as that kind of omission.

Whether a rule written about candidates’ own statements reaches a judge who said nothing is the question the commission would have to answer.

The commission’s deputy weighs in

One piece of Gregory’s argument drew a response from inside the system.

The Center Square reported on the RFE, naming the judges and laying out Gregory’s claims. In that story, the Colorado Judicial Performance Commission’s deputy director, Bill DeLisio, confirmed that a 2022 investigation into a judicial-branch contract and related disciplinary proceedings were not factored into the 2026 evaluations, calling them “department-level administrative matters.”

DeLisio did not say the omission was improper, and the reporting notes it is disputed how much some of the named judges knew about the underlying contract.

The Kirby allegation

The RFE repeats a claim Gregory has made in earlier filings, that Adams County Court Judge Leroy Kirby, a former chair of the discipline commission, did not disclose the basis for a private censure to the 17th Judicial District nominating commission and later to its performance commission when he stood for retention in 2024.

Gregory says the censure involved an inappropriate relationship with court staff and a later pattern of dishonesty. The commission’s 2019 annual report describes a private censure of an unnamed judge, and Gregory connects it to Kirby through commission rosters and his own account. The report names no one, and Kirby remains a sitting judge.

Gregory told RMV he had personally asked the commission’s director to verify Kirby’s disciplinary history in 2024 and that the vetting never happened.

Gregory also renewed a request he has made before, that Gov. Jared Polis or the legislature call a special session to revisit HJR26-1029, a resolution that would ask an out-of-state attorney general to investigate alleged corruption in the judicial branch, and to begin impeachment proceedings against Kirby.

The RFE runs 68 pages and names 122 judges. The commission has not said whether it will open it as a complaint. Under its own rules, it can decline a request that does not state grounds for discipline.