The Colorado judiciary is on the verge of a low point of black judges sitting on more than one level of the bench. Judge William Robbins of the Denver District Court will retire in December, leaving a lack of black judges on any district bench in the state. And Court of Appeals Judge Karen Ashby will retire in 2019, meaning there will not be any black judges on Colorado’s appellate courts. The Supreme Court has one black justice in its history, Gregory Kellam Scott. According to 2017 data provided by the judiciary’s public information office, just 1.2 percent of judges in the state self-identified as black or African American, though the data does not include county court judges.
Those numbers paint a picture that doesn’t look much better than when Denver County Court Judge Gary Jackson joined the Denver District Attorney’s Office in the early 1970s. At the time, Colorado had two black judges.
In an effort to address the representation gap, the Sam Cary Bar Association hosted a CLE Wednesday night to encourage members to apply for judicial positions. A panel of current and retired black state judges spoke about why they decided to join the judiciary,and offered advice to attendees about the application and nomination process.
“We have what I call two major blemishes on our judiciary, on our bar association, on our community to be in this position,” Jackson said, speaking about the gaps left by Robbins’ and Ashby’s retirements.
The panelists included Judges Robert Russell, Larry Naves, Michael Mullins, Karen Ashby, William Robbins, Dianne Briscoe and Brian Campbell, as well as former appellate court nominating commission member April Jones. Russell, Naves, Mullins and Robbins are retired from the bench.
Russell, who served on the Arapahoe County and 18th Judicial District benches, said he decided he wanted to be a judge in 1969. He watched much of the trial of Bobby Seale, the only black member of the Chicago Eight, a group of defendants tried for charges related to anti-Vietnam War protests. Seale’s trial was eventually separated from the rest of the defendants, and his conviction was the only one of the group’s not eventually reversed.
Judge Julius Hoffman behaved unprofessionally during the trial proceedings, and eventually ordered Seale bound and gagged when he continued to protest at his trial with the other seven defendants.
“I came to the conclusion that I would be a better judge than that,” Russell said. “So I decided I wanted to be a judge before I went to law school.”
Russell cautioned attendees about the difficulty of advancing in the judicial system. He said as a magistrate judge, he applied to county court positions six times before he was appointed, and another six times to the district bench before ascending there.
Ashby’s decision that she wanted to become a judge wasn’t cemented early on like Russell’s. She said she did not have the desire for many years as a practicing lawyer both in the public and private sectors, calling it an “evolving process.”
“I was not one of those people who from the age of eight wanted to be a judge,” she said. “At one point, I just started thinking, rather than being the one who’s advocating a particular side, it would be kind of nice to be in the position to be the person who got to decide what was the right thing to do.” Before her appointment to the Court of Appeals in 2013, Ashby spent time on Aurora’s municipal bench and on Denver’s juvenile court.
She told the CLE’s attendees about the importance of being genuine during the judicial application process, which she acknowledged is intimidating.
“Because of the formality of it and the intimidating nature, you can get very stiff and you can forget to be you,” Ashby said. “You’re not trying to impress them by artificial means.” She recalled being caught off guard by a question from a nominating commission member about the last book she’d read. She joked about wondering whether she should say she had read something difficult like Winston Churchill’s biography, but realized it would serve her better to talk about the mystery novel she’d actually read. Ashby said she ended up bantering with the commission member about it as a result.
Jackson highlighted a bright spot in increasing the number of black judges on Colorado’s bench. He said the vacancy created by Robbins’ retirement has four black applicants. All four of them have backgrounds in the public sector, and two are currently in private practice. Jones, the nominating commission member, echoed the importance of increasing diverse applicants to the judiciary. She also emphasized the importance of diversity on the nominating commissions.
“You see what happens when your pipeline takes some time off,” Jones said. “If you don’t keep it going, you’re going to have these gaps, and we can’t afford to do that.”
— Julia Cardi