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

Coloradans learned who the three finalists are for a state Supreme Court vacancy, and new data show that Colorado’s federal trial judges reduced their backlog of motions in civil cases.

Supreme Court vacancy

•  With the unexpected departure of Justice Melissa Hart, the Colorado Supreme Court has its first vacancy in five years. As of today, the governor has just over one week to select the newest member among three candidates for the job:

Chief Judge Susan Blanco of Larimer and Jackson counties has been a trial judge since 2017. Before that, she was a prosecutor, a defense attorney and a legal representative for children in neglect cases. She leads the judiciary’s IT and access-to-justice committees, and she formed her jurisdiction’s competency court program to address the services being provided to criminal defendants who suffer from mental issues.

Judge Christopher Zenisek of Jefferson and Gilpin counties has been a trial judge since 2012. He serves on the Supreme Court’s Civil Rules Committee and has handled multiple high-profile trials, including the 4,000-plaintiff litigation spawned by the Marshall fire’s damage. Fun fact: He succeeded former District Court Judge Brian D. Boatright when Boatright was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Andrea S. Wang works in the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, where she largely represents the state in water-related litigation. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Colorado, where she handled cases involving companies that attempted to defraud the government. She was also a finalist for the previous Supreme Court vacancy in 2020.

•  Anyone with comments for the governor can send them to gov_judicialappointments@state.co.us.

Oral arguments

•  The Supreme Court also comes back for oral arguments starting tomorrow. Here are the five cases being heard:

People v. Ceus: Was the Court of Appeals correct that a jury instruction for child abuse resulting in death didn’t actually require jurors to find that the child abuse resulted in death?

People v. Abdul-Rahman: When a defendant’s parole has been revoked, does he need to appeal to the Parole Board internally before he can seek a judge’s review?

People v. Gerle: Did a trial judge improperly block evidence of a defendant’s BDSM-related activities with the alleged victim in the defendant’s trial for falsely imprisoning and assaulting the victim?

People v. Mena: Was a judge wrong to order a new trial on all counts, even though the jury signaled it had acquitted the defendant of some charges and could not reach an agreement on the others?

Northern Integrated Supply Project Water Activity Enterprise v. Vima Partners LLC et al.: Can a water-related enterprise (government-owned business) in Northern Colorado condemn private property for a pipeline?

Heard on appeal

• The Supreme Court concluded Colorado’s anti-SLAPP law is unconstitutional to the extent it requires that final orders from county court judges go directly to the Court of Appeals, which isn’t something the state constitution allows for.

•  A defendant convicted of murder in Arapahoe County hadn’t shown that prosecutors treated him more harshly than his co-defendants because of his race, the justices ruled.

•  The Supreme Court will decide whether the Court of Appeals employed the correct framework in upholding a trial judge’s decision not to terminate a mother’s legal rights over her child.

•  By 2-1, the Court of Appeals determined an insurance company violated state law when it waited nearly a year to provide an injured motorist with the policy of the at-fault driver, even though the policy wasn’t in effect at the time of the crash.

In federal news

•  New data from the federal judiciary show that as of Sept. 30, Colorado’s federal trial judges had 37 motions pending for six months or longer in civil cases. For context, there were 272 outstanding motions in the court just two years earlier.

•  A large number of the motions on the list were decided sometime after the reporting window ended, but some judges are still sitting on motions that were filed years ago.

•  A federal judge gave the government three hours to give a man his ID documents back, after she previously terminated all restrictions on his immigration custody.

Vacancies and appointments

•  The governor appointed civil litigator Ryan L. Hess to the Montrose County Court, where he succeeds now-District Court Judge Laura E.H. Harvell.

•  There are three finalists to succeed former Judge Sean K. Murphy on the San Miguel County Court: Matthew John Bayma, John James England and Melanie Susan Morgan.

•  There are two finalists to succeed retiring Teller County Court Judge Theresa Kilgore: Elizabeth Ann McClintock and Ryan John Skajewski.

Miscellaneous proceedings

•  A judge can continue to participate in his jurisdiction’s veterans treatment court, even if the district attorney’s office has withdrawn due to concerns about the program, the state’s judicial ethics panel advised.

•  Attorney General Phil Weiser has joined another multistate lawsuit challenging the federal government’s fast-tracking of fossil fuel projects.

On break

•  Court Crawl will be on break next week and will return later in February.