2020 colorado judge evaluations: superficial

The judge reviews by the Colorado judicial performance commission are available. The reviews are for the judges up for retention in November.

Consider the recommendations with a grain of salt. No background checks were done. The commissions don’t know whether the judges they’ve reviewed have been disciplined. The commissions don’t have any complaints that have been filed against the judges.

The commissions don’t hold public hearings to get comments. The commissions don’t have much historical information about the judges because the executive director for the performance commissions destroys all documents except the final, watered-down report.

The commissions (there are 23 commissions - one in each of the 22 judicial districts and a state commission that makes the rules and evaluates appellate judges) simply don’t have enough information to reasonably provide a knowledgeable recommendation about any judge. The commissions receive some documents provided by the judge under review, talk with the judge, and do a little courtroom observation when the judge usually knows they are there.

A very limited number of surveys are sent to some chosen people. Those chosen people are the only people who can complete a survey confidentially.

Although you can go to the performance commission website and comment on a judge, such comments are not confidential which often discourages someone from commenting.

What if someone uses a survey to relate some specific, outrageous instance about a judge? That incident gets covered up by the methodology the performance commissions use.

The executive director ensures the judicial performance commission members only see numerical aggregate totals from the surveys. The commission members don’t see any specific instances of conduct that are related on the surveys.

And the “performance standard” the commissions claim the judges meet? That standard doesn’t exist.
There is no threshold or bar the judges must meet to get a “meets performance standard” recommendation.

This was apparent in 2018 when the performance commissions used a scorecard on their website. The scorecard isn’t being used this year.

That’s probably because the scorecard showed the problems with the performance commission system. Some judges were getting really low scores yet they were still receiving favorable recommendations. Like we said, there is no performance standard.

As in 2018, 2 judges this year received unfavorable recommendations. One of those judges is a part-time county court judge who doesn’t have a law degree. He’s Craig Dolezal in Sedgwick County.

The other judge with an unfavorable recommendation is 17th Judicial District Court Judge Tomee Crespin.
We’ll have more detail about the reviews at a later date. But you should know they’re available right now – less than three months before the election.

As always, all appellate court judges received favorable recommendations. No appellate court judge has ever received an unfavorable recommendation from the state commission on judicial performance.

One of the appellate court judges, Craig Welling, has a campaign against his retention. Link below.
The other Court of Appeals judge up for retention had a performance review done when he was a district court judge which noted he was 100% biased in favor of the prosecution. He's Ted Tow.

The Supreme Court justices up for retention are newbies: Melissa Hart and Carlos Samour.

You can read more about the judicial performance system on the “judging judges” page on our website.

Due to a lack of transparency in the judicial branch, and these ridiculously superficial performance reviews, voters are ill-equipped to cast a knowledgeable vote when it comes to judges.
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But when judges are retained, it does reaffirm to the judicial branch that no one cares about the lack of transparency.

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