Following her convictions for felony menacing and child abuse, news reports surfaced describing Adrienne Marie Stone’s history of threatening neighbors, endangering her kids and maintaining an unsanitary “hoarder” household.

But on Tuesday, the mess that members of the Colorado Supreme Court were concerned about was the unclear sequence of events underlying Stone’s prosecution.

In an unusual move that further complicated matters, some members of the court wondered openly during oral arguments whether it had been a mistake to hear Stone’s appeal in the first place.

Initially, the justices agreed to review Stone’s convictions to answer the unsettled legal question of whether a police officer who enters a home without a warrant, but with the consent of an occupant, may leave the home and reenter for a different purpose without seeking consent again.

The problem, pointed out Justice Richard L. Gabriel, was that neither the trial judge nor the state’s Court of Appeals found Arvada police Sgt. Betsy Westbrook reentered Stone’s home “for a different purpose.”

Moreover, Westbrook, who was the first officer to enter Stone’s home in 2018 to investigate allegations of menacing, contradicted her own testimony and that of fellow responders when explaining her movements in and out of Stone’s house without a warrant.

“My problem, with all due respect to Officer Westbrook: her testimony was all over the place. And the trial court tried desperately to figure out what the chronology was,” said Gabriel. “This case is a factual mess.”

There was no dispute that Westbrook arrived at Stone’s house after receiving a report that she had threatened her teenage son with a knife. The son, Nicholas Maerz Jr., who later spoke with FOX31 about his mother’s case, invited Westbrook inside. Westbrook took pictures of the knife with her cell phone and observed the cluttered and hazardous interior of the home.

She then stepped outside to retrieve her camera from her vehicle. At that point, Stone returned home and was enraged at the police presence.

The testimony about what happened next was unclear and contradictory. Westbrook spoke with a neighbor for some unknown period and reentered the home – perhaps with a caseworker, perhaps with a school resource officer, or perhaps without either of them. Law enforcement and other government officials streamed in and out of the house, never obtaining consent, and documented the interior.

Upon her arrest, Stone moved to suppress evidence obtained from the warrantless entries into her home, arguing they violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches.

Chief Judge Jeffrey R. Pilkington, after hearing the muddled retelling of the officers’ story, decided Maerz had validly allowed Westbrook into his and his mother’s home “for the limited purpose” of talking about Stone’s menacing. The consent was limited to the kitchen and entryway, and no one gave permission “to search the entire Home, or to take photographs or otherwise document the Home,” he wrote.

Consequently, Westbrook’s first and second entrances were lawful, but all others were not. The evidence obtained beyond Westbrook’s own photos and observations was largely inadmissible at trial.

In 2021, a three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals affirmed Stone’s convictions, although it found other problems with the case. Specifically, the prosecution told Pilkington on the first day of trial that Westbrook, who is now deputy police chief in Brighton, had taken more photos than originally believed. Pilkington allowed the surprise evidence to be used at trial, but the Court of Appeals found the prosecution’s representation was untrue, as another officer actually took the photos as part of the unlawful entry.

Nevertheless, the appellate panel upheld Pilkington’s core finding that Westbrook’s exit and reentry into Stone’s home was constitutional, as Maerz was entitled to give consent to her entrance and never revoked it.

“Thus, for consent to encompass a subsequent re-entry, the entry and re-entry must be closely related in time and purpose,” wrote Judge Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov.

On appeal, Stone’s questioned how the Court of Appeals concluded Westbrook’s exit and reentry were close in time.

“The record unambiguously shows that Officer Westbrook did not reenter the home quickly after a brief exit,” said attorney Tillman Clark. Moreover, upon Westbrook’s reentry, she allegedly pivoted from the initial menacing call to investigating child neglect.

“I’m asking this court to hold that where consent is given to officers to enter a home for the purposes of criminal investigation,” Clark continued, “such consent does not extent to an additional entry for a different investigatory purpose, regardless of the amount of time that passes.”

“And the reason we care about purpose – it goes to the scope of the consent, right?” asked Gabriel.

Correct, responded Clark.

Although the prosecution countered in its written filings that Stone was inappropriately trying to relitigate the facts of Westbrook’s reentry to the Supreme Court, Gabriel repeatedly slammed the government for insisting its version of events was the one the court should stick with.

“I don’t meant to disparage Sgt. Westbrook or anybody’s motives here, but it seems to me there’s an unfairness to Ms. Stone when the record is really jumbled because the prosecutors’ witnesses either didn’t remember the facts or whatever else,” he said. “Do you understand why that’s troubling? Ms. Stone didn’t create this problem.”

“We agree with opposing counsel that there was some contradictory testimony,” conceded Daniel R. Magalotti of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

Ultimately, several members of the court suggested that for a variety of reasons – unclear facts, the Court of Appeals’ potential misinterpretation of what happened, a wrongly framed legal question – they may dismiss the appeal without a decision. Magalotti and Clark both opposed that notion.

On the other hand, Justice Maria E. Berkenkotter attempted to engage with the undisputed issue in the case: that Westbrook gained consent to enter with a particular understanding of what she was investigating.

Maerz “consented to her going and getting the camera and coming back to take a better picture of the knife. And it’s undisputed that she didn’t get the camera and she didn’t take a picture of the knife,” Berkenkotter said.

If the scope of the investigation changed after the exit, she wondered, “Does that matter here?”

The case is Stone v. People.