2022 was a seismic year in Colorado politics, boasting a pair of consequential elections that reconfigured coalitions in both parties and extended Democratic dominance, a legislative session that will reshape the state’s efforts to combat the fentanyl epidemic, and major changes to precedent and personnel in the court system.

Here are some of the noteworthy events from the state and federal courts that affected Colorado:

Year of the woman

Colorado’s federal trial court has existed since statehood and for nearly all that time, only three women were appointed and confirmed as judges. But after President Joe Biden took office, he doubled that number, installing three more women on the U.S. District Court headquartered in Denver. Two of them took office this year: Charlotte N. Sweeny and Nina Y. Wang.

In addition, the court hired three new magistrate judges, who do not handle the same volume of major decisions as their presidentially-appointed counterparts, but they can and do preside over cases entirely on their own. Again, all three additions are women: Maritza Dominguez Braswell joined this year as the lone federal judge sitting in Colorado Springs, and Susan Prose and Kathryn Starnella will take office in 2023.

10th Circuit comes back, breaks news

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit is based in Denver and hears appeals in federal cases from Colorado and five neighboring states. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the court held a biennial conference in Colorado Springs featuring judges and lawyers from across the circuit, and 2022 marked the resumption of the gathering, with some high-profile guests.

Two members of the U.S. Supreme Court made an appearance: Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Roberts generated national headlines when he opined that the legitimacy of the widely-unpopular Supreme Court should not hinge on “opinions people disagree with.”

Right to record

For years, federal courts elsewhere in the country have recognized the First Amendment protects a person’s right to video record police officers who perform their duties in public. But the 10th Circuit was one of the holdouts that did not clearly establish such a right, meaning officers sued for First Amendment violations were able to escape liability through the doctrine of qualified immunity.

That changed in July, when the 10th Circuit affirmed that not only does the First Amendment guarantee the right to record, but that the right existed at least as early as May 2019.

Reasonable doubt analogies

Colorado’s second-highest court sent a consistent message to trial judges over many years: They should not try to describe the concept of reasonable doubt to jurors using analogies to everyday events, like solving a puzzle or driving a car. But for the most part, the Court of Appeals simply scolded the judges and let the defendants’ convictions stand, finding the analogies were not so erroneous as to diminish the burden of proof required by “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

This year, the Colorado Supreme Court stepped in and actually overturned a conviction based on a trial judge’s plain English explanation of reasonable doubt. As a result, the Court of Appeals reversed several more convictions under the new rubric. All of them happened to be from Adams County, which was, by far, the jurisdiction that generated the most appeals alleging faulty analogies.

Renewed focus on racial bias

During the legislative session, Democratic lawmakers attempted to enact new protocols for rooting out racial bias in jury selection. The state’s 22 elected district attorneys, however, tanked that effort. The legislators then implored the Colorado Supreme Court’s criminal rules committee to take the baton and attempt to curb implicit bias through its own policymaking apparatus.

The committee produced a draft proposal that would revamp the way trial judges decide whether prosecutors are removing people of color from juries based on their race, which the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. In addition to laying out a new, objective standard for looking at the juror dismissals, there are a list of reasons that are invalid by default for excusing jurors of color because they historically correlate to jurors’ race.

The Supreme Court will hold public comment early next year on the rule change proposal.

SCOTUS reverberations

The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court produced several decisions departing from established precedent. The biggest outcry came in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned longstanding federal protections for abortion. Although abortion remains legal in Colorado, the impact from Dobbs manifested in the Democratic sweep across the state in this year’s elections.

But the case with the biggest legal impact locally was New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. The ruling makes it easier to strike down gun safety laws as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, and gun rights proponents quickly filed challenges to state and local regulations in Colorado. Gun ordinances in Boulder County have already been put on hold, and the fate of Colorado’s statewide ban on large-capacity magazines will be litigated next year.

This fall, the Supreme Court also heard a major free speech case out of Colorado, 303 Creative v. Elenis, which could narrow the scope of protections for the LGBTQ population under states’ antidiscrimination laws.