The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday overruled a 7-year-old decision of the state’s second-highest court after a plaintiff, the defendants and even one of the judges who participated in the decision called it incorrect.

Typically, appellate courts can only review final judgments that address all of the claims in a civil case. However, Colorado’s procedural rules permit trial judges to designate a ruling as “final,” even when it only addresses some of the claims, if the judge believes there is “no just reason” for delaying an appeal.

In 2019, Daniel Wolf brought suit against Michael J. Brenneman and Jeffrey B. Selby, alleging they lied to a grand jury and defamed him to the media about a real estate development project that led to him being criminally charged. A Denver jury ultimately acquitted Wolf.

The following year, then-District Court Judge Michael J. Vallejos found the defendants had immunity for testifying as grand jury witnesses, even if their testimony was false. At the same time, he declined to dismiss the defamation claim.

Wolf subsequently asked Vallejos to deem his decision final so Wolf could immediately appeal the immunity question to the Court of Appeals. Vallejos agreed, reasoning the dismissed claims were not only the “more substantial” ones, but if the Court of Appeals disagreed with him and reinstated the claims, everything should be tried together at once.

In July 2022, 23 months after Vallejos’ original order, a three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals dismissed Wolf’s appeal. By 2-1, the panel believed Vallejos’ reasons for authorizing the mid-case appeal were not compelling enough.

Vallejos “did not otherwise explain why a party would suffer some hardship or injustice that can be alleviated only by an immediate appeal,” wrote then-Judge John Daniel Dailey for himself and Judge Ted C. Tow III.

The majority relied on a 2017 precedent-setting decision of the Court of Appeals, Allison v. Engel, that determined a trial judge’s desire to avoid multiple trials at the conclusion of the appeals process is an insufficient reason to allow an immediate appeal in the first place.

Two of the judges who decided the Allison case — Dailey and Judge Michael H. Berger — also heard Wolf’s appeal. But Berger now dissented, saying he had changed his mind about the “overly broad and draconian” statement that a trial judge’s concern about multiple trials was insufficient.

“The district court is in a far better position than we to determine the risks associated with duplicative proceedings,” he argued. “The parties and the district court are now required to proceed with an entire trial at great expense on only one defamation claim. Meanwhile, the remaining claims will languish under the specter of reversal.”

Wolf turned to the Supreme Court, arguing it should discard Allison as wrongly decided. The defendants agreed with him, noting the lawsuit was more than four years old, still had not gone to trial and they had received no decision from the Court of Appeals about whether they were entitled to immunity.

“Brenneman and Selby have had to engage in another three years of appellate proceedings that have thus far failed to provide any finality,” their lawyers wrote. “In circumstances such as these, Allison should yield to immediate appeal or the protections of absolute immunity become illusory.”

The Supreme Court concluded the Court of Appeals went too far in restricting trial judges’ ability to facilitate immediate appeals.

“We therefore emphasize what we explained many years ago,” wrote Justice Melissa Hart in the May 20 opinion. “Appellate courts reviewing a district court’s finding that there is ‘no just reason for delay’ … do so only to determine whether the court abused its discretion and may overturn those decisions only if they are ‘manifestly arbitrary, unreasonable, or unfair.'”

She declined to say whether the Court of Appeals should accept Vallejos’ reasons for authorizing the appeal when viewed through the correct lens. But Hart noted a “general skepticism” of absolute rules that tie trial judges’ hands when making such decisions.

The case is Wolf v. Brenneman et al.