A federal judge declared Jefferson County’s appeal of his evidentiary decision “frivolous” on Thursday, which enables him to continue handling the civil rights litigation even as an appellate court separately addresses the appeal.

The order from U.S. District Court Judge S. Kato Crews came three days after a hearing in which the plaintiffs’ attorney warned that allowing Jeffco to immediately appeal a routine pretrial decision would afford government defendants another avenue for delaying cases.

In the underlying lawsuit, the surviving family of James Purdy sued the county, its elected sheriff, several jail personnel and the jail’s medical contractor. The family alleges Purdy, 76, died in custody after numerous falls that jail staff knew about, yet failed to prevent. The claims include violations of Purdy’s constitutional right to adequate medical care, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Colorado’s constitution and laws.

The Jeffco sheriff’s defendants moved in April to dismiss the claims against them. For the federal constitutional claim specifically, they invoked qualified immunity, a judicially created concept that shields government employees from civil lawsuits unless they violate a person’s clearly established rights.

Government defendants can assert qualified immunity early on with a motion to dismiss, and they can later raise it in a motion for summary judgment after the discovery of evidence has run its course. Notably, unlike most orders that can only be appealed at the conclusion of a case, a defendant can appeal a trial judge’s order denying qualified immunity immediately. As a consequence, there can be a delay for months or years while the appeal is decided.

Shortly after the Jeffco defendants filed their motion to dismiss, they also asked the court to stay, or pause, the case until Crews could determine whether the individual employees were entitled to immunity. U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy P. O’Hara declined to do so, and allowed for depositions of the defendants. Crews later upheld O’Hara’s order as reasonable.

The county then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, transferring control of the case from Crews to the circuit. Despite the fact that his order fell outside the category of immediately appealable decisions, the county deployed a creative argument.

A key purpose of qualified immunity is to protect government employees from “the ordinary burdens of litigation,” Jeffco reasoned. If defendants have to sit for depositions, they are experiencing the burdens of litigation and, effectively, have been denied qualified immunity. Therefore, defendants are entitled to appeal immediately.

“Qualified immunity was not any part of the analysis or anything I ruled upon,” countered Crews at the Dec. 1 hearing. “As I understand your argument, this would apply in any cases where qualified immunity is raised. That once a motion to dismiss is filed, an automatic stay of discovery should enter as to those defendants. Is that your view?”

And if denying the stay was equivalent to denying qualified immunity, he continued, what was the purpose of the motion to dismiss?

“There’s utterly no precedent for what they are doing here,” Darold W. Killmer, the plaintiffs’ attorney, told Crews.

In a Dec. 4 order, Crews agreed the 10th Circuit does not allow for immediate appeals of pretrial evidentiary decisions.

“To be sure, the Court’s determination of the Sheriff Defendants’ entitlement to qualified immunity will be reviewable on appeal once the Court rules on their motion to dismiss. That motion has been fully briefed as of June 2025, and the Court will rule on it in due course,” he wrote.

Crews added that the discovery of evidence against the government is not automatically halted “simply at a defendant’s mention of qualified immunity.”

The case is Estate of Purdy et al. v. Jefferson County, Colorado et al.