Welcome to Court Crawl, Colorado Politics’ roundup of news from the third branch of government.

All of the judges on this year’s general election ballot received new terms last week, plus the state’s chief justice provided candid remarks about one of the Colorado Supreme Court’s most controversial and high-profile decisions.

Election results

•  Of the 116 judges and justices up for retention this year, voters gave a thumbs-up to all of them. That includes Garfield County Court Judge Angela M. Roff, whose performance commission narrowly concluded she did not meet performance standards, as well as Baca County Court Judge Milla Lishchuk, whose performance commission deadlocked on her retention vote.

•  For the judges who were retained: Supreme Court justices will receive 10-year terms, Court of Appeals judges will serve for eight more years, district court judges have six years and county court judges will get a four-year term.

•  Voters also overwhelmingly approved Amendment H, which will change the constitutional structure for judicial discipline in a fashion that allows for slightly more transparency and a diminished role for the Supreme Court.

Trump disqualification case

•  Readers may recall that last year around this time, Colorado’s courts were asked to weigh in on whether Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was constitutionally disqualified from appearing on the ballot because he allegedly engaged in insurrection by attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. The state Supreme Court, by 4-3, said yes, his insurrectionist conduct rendered him ineligible — and the U.S. Supreme Court promptly reversed on narrow grounds.

•  Fast forwarding, Trump is now the president-elect and he has publicly raised the possibility of retribution against his critics. Speaking two days after the election, Chief Justice Monica M. Márquez, who voted with the majority in favor of Trump’s disqualification, provided an unusually candid glimpse into her vote in the case.

•  “I’d been lying awake since 2 a.m. thinking about it. Because I knew what that would mean. I understood fully the personal consequences that would flow from it. Consequences potentially to my career. Consequences potentially to my physical safety. The safety of my family. The safety of my coworkers, my colleagues, my law clerks, my neighbors,” she said at the Colorado Judicial Institute’s annual gala on Thursday night.

•  Colorado Politics is aware of only one other instance of a Supreme Court justice speaking out about the case. In September, Justice Melissa Hart told an audience in Colorado Springs that she was “swatted” after the decision — meaning someone called in a false emergency, leading police to enter her home with guns drawn.

•  Locally, though, the Trump decision was not a dealbreaker for a majority of voters, as all three Supreme Court justices who were up for retention — Márquez, who voted to disqualify, and two others who voted to keep Trump on the ballot — prevailed by similar margins.

In other Supreme Court news

•  The Supreme Court ruled judges don’t have to go through any specific procedure to designate a witness as an expert at trial, so long as they properly screen the expert testimony for reliability.

•  After a Denver judge admitted on appeal that she used the wrong standard when ordering the disclosure of documents in a civil lawsuit, the Supreme Court declined to issue an opinion and instead told her to redo the decision.

•  The justices confirmed that trial judges can’t pick which postconviction claims an appointed defense lawyer can investigate. Instead, if a defendant presents at least one claim that appears to have merit, the judge must send the entire motion to the public defender.

•  The Supreme Court will review a defendant’s allegations that the government engaged in selective prosecution by pursuing murder charges against him as an adult while offering cooperation deals to two other, non-Black juveniles who were involved alongside him.

•  During oral arguments, the Supreme Court was worried about imposing unrealistic standards on the process for insurance companies to reach settlements with injured parties.

In federal news

•  In March, more than a dozen federal judges — mostly appointees of Trump — went to Israel on a trip sponsored by the World Jewish Congress. Among the participants was Colorado’s Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Although it was his first visit to the country, Tymkovich has repeatedly gone to Ukraine and is currently assigned to the nation’s foreign surveillance appeals court.

•  Tymkovich spoke to Colorado Politics about his trip. The delegation met with members of the Israeli Supreme Court, an American citizen who was taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023 and lawyers who are defending Israel against allegations of genocide in the International Court of Justice for its killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

•  “I don’t think anybody kind of in a leadership position that we interacted with would consider the Gaza conflict genocide. Their perspective is kind of what you would expect, which is, ‘We were attacked and we are fighting back,'” Tymkovich said. “But time will tell whether these international legal bodies will successfully litigate some of the questions about international law that are at play here.”

•  Elsewhere, Tymkovich and other federal judges in Colorado met with lawyers for a series of roundtable discussions about jury trials, errors on appeal, criminal sentencing and other topics. Notably, U.S. District Court Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney described her new practice of meeting with criminal defendants after their incarceration and before their release on probation.

•  The 10th Circuit also dissolved an injunction and allowed a 2023 Colorado law to go into effect to generally raise the firearms purchasing age to 21.

Miscellaneous proceedings

•  The Colorado Judicial Institute, which is a nonprofit group that advocates for and educates the public about the judiciary, held its annual gala and presented its judicial excellence awards to three members of the bench: Chief Judge Mark A. MacDonnell of the 16th Judicial District (Otero, Bent and Crowley counties), Jefferson County Court Judge Verna L. Carpenter and Weld County Magistrate Randall Lococo.

•  Boulder County prosecutors are requesting new DNA testing for a man who has already served 12 years in prison for murder, but whose case was affected by the misconduct of state DNA analyst Yvonne “Missy” Woods.

•  Mesa County prosecutors are pursuing charges against two women for fraudulently filling out mail ballots in the 2024 election.