DENVER (Legal Newsline) - It's a simple public censure for the former chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court accused of failing to notice a disgruntled former employee had recorded a conversation with another justice before giving her a five-year, multimillion-dollar contract.
A special tribunal of the Colorado Supreme Court on Aug. 7 issued the censure against Nathan Coats, who served on the court for 20 years. He was chief justice from 2018-20 and was involved in discipline against Mindy Masias.
Masias was found in 2018 to have falsified an invoice seeking repayment for two chairs. She served as the chief of staff for State Court Administrator Christopher Ryan at the time.
The invoice situation led to a further probe of Masias, who had "narrowly failed in her bid to be appointed State Court Administrator in the previous year," the decision says.
A "number of irregularities" in past expense reports led to the courts system telling Masias to resign or be fired. Ryan held out hope Masias could be retained as a contractor, citing her long-standing relationships with chief judges and leadership teams in Colorado.
Coats said if no further instances of misconduct came to light, he would consider such a role for Masias. Her legal team negotiated a separation agreement that included a promise to have a meeting with Coats regarding a post-resignation contract.
Coats, however, failed to review the separation agreement, which included some important information.
"Had Justice Coats personally reviewed the executed separation agreement, he likely would have learned of Masias' surreptitious recording of former Chief Justice Nancy Rice, information which would have (and eventually did) cause him and the full Supreme Court to determine that a contract with Masias was inappropriate," the censure ruling says.
It was also determined someone had wiped Masias' laptop of information and an April 15, 2019, anonymous letter alleged further misconduct, but Coats signed Masias' training contract on June 3, 2019.
It was to pay her between $2.66 million and $2.75 million over five years. Six weeks later, Coats learned of the recording Masias made of her conversation with Rice, during which Masias asked why she had not been picked to be State Court Administrator.
Later that July, it was determined no one who would secretly record a judge could be given a contract to teach them. The contract was withdrawn and Ryan resigned as State Court Administrator.
The state's judicial discipline board alleged Coats failed to "perform judicial and administrative duties competently and diligently" by not reviewing the separation agreement, which led to the training contract.
He had also failed to wait until the completion of an investigation into the April anonymous letter before signing the training contract.
"Although former Chief Justice Coats authorized withdrawal from the contract immediately upon his learning of Masias' surreptitious recording of former Chief Justice Rice, compliance with the Colorado Code of Judicial Conduct required that former Chief Justice Coats prevent the Judicial Department from entering the contract prior to its public execution in June 2019," the decision says.
Coats had agreed to the censure on May 3.