The Denver-based federal appeals court concluded on Friday that a trial judge inappropriately allowed jurors to see several unflattering video clips of a plaintiff being belligerent toward police officers during a trial to determine whether police violated her constitutional rights.

Sasha Cronick pursued claims of unlawful search and arrest against Colorado Springs officers who handcuffed her minutes after she helped resuscitate a man who had stopped breathing from a drug overdose in 2018. After a trial last year, jurors sided with the defendants.

On appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Cronick argued that then-U. S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello allowed jurors to see harmful, irrelevant evidence of Cronick berating police officers in interactions subsequent to the events at hand. A three-judge panel agreed with her.

“On this point, consider what a jury might think while watching Cronick berate police officers and security guards, call them rude names, and threaten to sue them,” wrote Judge Gregory A. Phillips in the Aug. 28 opinion. Jurors might think, “she’s harassed so many people so many other times, why should it matter that she was unjustifiably arrested this time? The clips prompt these provocative questions, which is why they’re unfairly prejudicial. They distract from the jury’s actual assignment: whether the officers violated Cronick’s rights by unlawfully arresting and searching her at the Sun Springs Motel.”

At the same time, the 10th Circuit panel upheld Arguello’s imposition of $18,680 against Cronick and her lawyers for deleting electronic evidence.

On Dec. 12, 2018, Cronick was staying at the motel when she heard shouts for help. A man was lying unconscious outside of a guest room, apparently due to a drug overdose.

Cronick called 911 and talked with a dispatcher while simultaneously recording video. The footage showed Cronick instructing another woman how to perform chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Their efforts resulted in the man beginning to breathe again moments before first responders arrived.

“Sasha, you did a great job today. Thank you,” the dispatcher told her.

Cronick remained nearby, recording on her phone and intermittently answering questions about what happened. Officer Christopher Pryor walked up and learned Cronick was the one who called 911. He asked for her name and room number, but she responded she was “not answering questions like that,” then mentioned “police harassment.”

“Why don’t you leave the immediate area,” Pryor said, touching her out of view of his body-worn camera.

“Get your f—–g hands off me. Don’t f—–g touch me,” Cronick screamed while walking away.

“Lighten up, lady,” Pryor said while following her. “I asked you to leave the area.”

Other officers gathered around Pryor. Cronick began demanding their names and, in response, Pryor and Officer Robert McCafferty placed her in handcuffs and patted her down.

Cronick later went to trial in municipal court for the charge of failure to disperse. A judge agreed she came “dangerously close” to being convicted, but it was unclear whether Pryor had ever actually given her an order to leave, resulting in her acquittal.

Cronick then sued the officers. Arguello determined a jury could find Cronick did not pose a threat or otherwise breach the peace, except for her yelling in response to being touched. A jury could also find that Pryor had not given an “order” to Cronick, such that she disobeyed it by declining to leave the scene. The officers immediately appealed to the 10th Circuit, which upheld Arguello’s order in 2024 and put the case on track for trial.

However, before trial, Arguello considered what should happen after the revelation that Cronick deleted YouTube videos and certain online communications relevant to the case. She decided monetary sanctions were appropriate for Cronick and the plaintiff’s attorneys for “enabling and facilitating Ms. Cronick’s ongoing disobedience” of an evidentiary order.

Arguello also instructed the jury, as a consequence for the missing video evidence, to note that Cronick “regularly records police officers, and those recordings demonstrate Ms. Cronick engages in behavior that is disruptive to police business.”

Finally, over objections that the footage would “smear Ms. Cronick’s character,” Arguello allowed the defendants to play video clips of Cronick’s encounters with police after the Sun Springs Motel incident. The videos depicted Cronick calling police offensive names, accusing an officer of “beat(ing) your f—–g wife,” and asking viewers for money.

The defense attorney characterized Cronick as being “on the hunt for content,” including at the Sun Springs Motel.

“The case that we were dealing with, there were no factual disputes. It was on video from 10 different angles,” Cronick’s attorney, David Lane, told the 10th Circuit panel during oral arguments. “The only issue for the jury was, were Sasha Cronick’s (rights) violated given these videos? All this other stuff does nothing but dump on her character. ‘She’s a crazy woman who screams at cops’.”

The defendants maintained that the videos showed a pattern of conduct by Cronick.

“Ms. Cronick was asked to leave the scene. She did not leave the scene. She did not leave the scene because her pattern was to record, get a response, and then make money off it,” said Ryan D. Doherty with the Colorado Springs City Attorney’s Office.

“These videos seem highly prejudicial to me,” countered Judge Carolyn B. McHugh. “Can I come away saying these other videos had no impact on the jury’s decision here because the evidence with respect to the case at issue was so overwhelmingly against the plaintiff that this doesn’t matter? I can’t say that.”

Ultimately, the panel agreed with Cronick that the videos invited jurors to view her as a “bad person” who habitually disrupts police officers.

“We see the pattern the officers wanted the jury to accept: She did this in the videos, so she did it here too,” wrote Phillips. “Cronick’s trial was supposed to concern her arrest at the Sun Springs Motel, not her later police encounters.”

The panel ordered a new trial. It also upheld Arguello’s monetary sanctions for the deletion of evidence. Phillips noted that if Cronick’s lawyers wanted to avoid liability for their client’s actions, they could have withdrawn from the case or provided Arguello with enough information to understand what happened.

“In a time when a reversal of a civil jury verdict after trial is beyond a rarity,” said Lane, “we are extremely gratified that the 10th Circuit recognized that Sasha Cronick’s trial was so grossly unfair that the only just resolution was to grant her a new trial.”

Colorado Springs declined to comment on behalf of the defendants.

The case is Cronick v. Pryor et al.