Three members of the state’s Court of Appeals fielded questions from curious high school students on Tuesday, one of the most common subjects being how they could separate their emotions about cases from the impartial legal decisions they are expected to render.

The judges conceded that it takes practice.

“Sometimes I see myself getting mad at a police officer not giving the correct warnings, like Miranda warnings, or doing something to coerce a confession out of somebody,” said Judge Matthew D. Grove. “Yeah, there’s stuff that has kept me up at night. It comes with the territory.”

Grove, along with Judges David J. Richman and Ted C. Tow III, were part of the three-person panel that heard two real appeals at STRIVE Prep – RISE, a charter school in the Green Valley Ranch section of Denver. The visit was part of the judicial branch’s 35-year-old Courts in the Community program. Last fall, the Colorado Supreme Court traveled to Pomona High School in Arvada to hold oral arguments, and the justices will repeat the experience next month at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction.

Ross Gothelf is the teacher for the civics and economics “Life 101” course for 11th grade students. Months before the event, he said two attorneys and a judge oriented him to the cases and provided him with lesson materials about the court system in Colorado.

“I was a political science major and almost went to law school, but ended up staying in the classroom,” Gothelf said. “I want to give a lot of credit to the scholars: They are juggling a lot right now. To see their level of engagement with the cases feels so phenomenal.”

Gothelf’s students witnessed two half-hour oral arguments covering distinct areas of the law. In the case of Hogan et al. v. City of Englewood, an Arapahoe County judge ruled that governmental immunity did not shield Englewood from being sued after two women crashed their golf cart at Broken Tee Golf Course and sustained injuries due to an obscured tree stump sticking out of the ground.

The city appealed, arguing the stump and the surrounding tall grass were not an unreasonable risk to health or safety, especially given that the plaintiffs were not on the cart path.

“There’s a common sense element to this case and there’s also a golf context to this case,” explained David M. Westbrook, the attorney for plaintiffs Rebecca Hogan and Betty Medina. “It’s kind of a common sense thing that a stump is a trip hazard.”

In the second case, People v. Chapel, an Arapahoe County jury convicted David Joseph Chapel of two trespassing charges stemming from a night of drinking at a house party. When Chapel awoke at 4 a.m. at the party house, he heard a loud noise and saw people fleeing out the door and over the balcony.

Because the temperature was below freezing, Chapel tried to enter neighboring houses for warmth. One resident found him in her apartment, but agreed that Chapel neither argued nor fought with her when asked to leave. Chapel contended on appeal that jury should have heard a “choice-of-evils” defense that would have justified his trespassing because of an emergency.

“We’re all thinking for ourselves, ‘I wonder if what he did was reasonable. I wonder if it was his only option’,” said public defender Mark Evans. But in reality, “we’re deciding whether a group of 12 people get to make that decision on their own.”

Between cases, the audience was able to question the attorneys. One student asked about the length of time a criminal case takes, to which Evans responded that his client, Chapel, was finally having his appeal heard three years after being arrested in March 2019.

“In all candor, the amount of time between the point of conviction and when the appeal gets resolved is an injustice in itself. He’s already done with his sentence, so what we’re fighting about right now is his criminal record,” Evans said.

Junior Eliud Jimenez addressed Grove specifically, noting that the judge had appeared frustrated that the trial court in the Hogan case never held a hearing to lay out the facts about the allegedly-dangerous stump for the appeals court to review.

“I know you were struggling with the case just now,” Jimenez said. “I know it can be frustrating. My question is: How do you guys keep your cool? How do you stay calm?”

“Some of us are better than others,” Tow quipped. “You do have to keep remembering that we are a servant of the people and we are essentially representing our state when we’re up here and we need to act accordingly.”

“To be clear,” Grove added, “my frustration today is not with the conduct of the attorneys. … Expressing frustration with the law and how it works or doesn’t work is different from having somebody not answering the question or answering the question they want to. But deep breaths, remembering who you are and why you’ve got the robe.”

Multiple students probed the judges’ skill at staying objective. Morgan Rasmussen observed that certain cases are bound to bother even them. 

Tow answered that he used to prosecute crimes where the victims were children. The emotions do not go away, he agreed, but he has learned how to keep those emotions from affecting his job.

“I refer to it as my ‘garage door.’ It just shuts and keeps the traumatic part away from the thoughtful part about the law,” he said.

Gothelf, the teacher, said afterwards that many of his students were immigrants, or their parents were. Consequently, the law for them was not an abstract issue. Some attendees found the cases entertaining and gained an insight into what a career in law might look like.

JiRyan Ellis said that the students learned the details of both cases beforehand, but his opinion changed after hearing the arguments, particularly with the golf cart case.

“I came into it thinking hey, they (the plaintiffs) were knowingly breaking the rules,” he explained. “But the lawyer gave me a new perspective on their side.”

“I was completely with the government. Follow rules! That’s how I think,” countered Sasha McCalman.

Richman, who joined the Court of Appeals upon his 2008 appointment, recalled to a smaller group of students that he knew he wanted to be a lawyer when he was roughly high school age. His inspiration was the 1964 book Gideon’s Trumpet, which described the story behind the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright. The case established that indigent criminal defendants have the right to an appointed attorney, and spurred the creation of the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender.

“I worked really hard in high school and college to get to law school,” he said.

One teacher asked the panel of judges how consistently the hundreds of trial court judges across Colorado apply the law, given that the Court of Appeals sees almost every case that is appealed directly from all 22 judicial districts in the state. Tow, a former trial court judge, said all errors in judging are not created equal. It is one thing for a judge to be reversed on appeal without having the proper guidance, he said, but it would be different if “I just blow it.”

“I took your question a little differently,” Richman interjected, “to be: What is the quality of judges across the state?”

He explained that Colorado, unlike some other states that elect judges, relies on a nonpartisan, citizen-led system of commissions to screen and recommend judicial candidates.

“Colorado is, I think, considered a shining example of how judges should be put on the bench,” Richman said.