Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Colorado Court of Appeals

   Here's how the Colorado Court of Appeals works: it's divided into different divisions, but the divisions aren't assigned to particular regions of the state or particular lower courts or anything.  The judge in charge just assigns cases to whichever division he wants to.  The precedent set by divisions of the court of appeals is not binding on other divisions of the court of appeals, so if the same issue is before two of them in different cases (or if the same issue comes up again after one division has decided it), then whichever appellate judge is deciding the case at hand may choose to disregard any other appellate court decisions.

   Now, since the divisions aren't assigned to a particular region of the state, this severely limits the importance of Colorado appellate court decisions.  If a trial judge were to make a ruling which was in conflict with the "precedent" established by the appellate court, and someone were to appeal said ruling, then the case could end up in the division that originally set the precedent, or it could end up in a division that disagrees with the precedent and completely disregards it.  So even if appellate court decisions are ideally supposed to be binding, for practical purposes nothing is really set in the Colorado state courts until it makes it up to the supreme court.  If the state ever starts assigning appllate cases to divisions that are based on geographic region (or some other consistent scheme), then appellate decisions will suddenly become much more meaningful.  In the meantime... they're good to know.  Sometimes.  

   For this reason, I have almost stopped bothering with Colorado Court of Appeals decisions several times.  I still keep summarizing them here because they are often informative.  They can give the police insight into the kind of reasoning that courts use to analyze cases, they might refer to more important cases, and they can indicate judicial trends.  

   The information in this post is partly taken from the Court of Appeals' website, partly taken from any of the slew of appellate decisions which contain a phrase similar to "we are not bound by the decisions of other divisions of this court," and partly from my own analysis of the result.  The reason I'm bothering you with this information will become apparent in the next post.

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