State Bill Colorado » Appellate

Well-Traveled Life: Judge Ney’s Memoirs Subject Of Thursday Signing

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:44:10 +0000

By Ali McNally, STATE BILL COLORADO
DENVER — Ever hear of the man who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, studied art, engineered for a space program and then decided to go to law school and became an appellate judge for 15 years?
Former Colorado Court of Appeals Judge Peter Ney did. He’s lived that life, and he also wrote a book, “Getting Here: From a Seat on a Train to a Seat on a Bench.” A book signing will be 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Tattered Cover in Lower Downtown. Ney will also talk about his experiences and sign books Jan. 7 at the Littleton Museum.
The “jack of all trades” said the book has a patriotic theme based on how America allowed him to successfully make his many career changes.
“I’ve always appreciated how I could always follow my own views. I didn’t start out as a lawyer. I started out as a designer. When the space program started, I was an engineer and then took classes to be a lawyer at night,” he said.
Ney said he got the idea for the book when his family persuaded him to write his memoirs after he retired as a full-time judge in 2003.
“They wanted to have a history of my life because I had so many interesting twists and turns in it,” he said. “The family kept saying, ‘Let’s write it down so we have it.’”
Those memoirs spanned 70 years back to his first memories as a child in Germany just a few days before his seventh birthday.
“Those are my earliest memories. Just before I was 7, the apartment where I lived with my parents was destroyed during Kristallnacht,” he said.
Two months later, Ney said, his father put him in a rescue project known as Kindertransport, which rushed Jewish children on a train from Nazi-occupied countries to England before the war started. Ney’s parents found a sponsor and were able to join him a few months later. He was among the small percentage of children whose families survived.
A year later, Ney’s family arrived in the United States, and he was able to go to college to study art. He moved to Denver in 1960 to work for the aerospace division at the Martin Company [now Lockheed Martin] as a human engineer (“We didn’t design human beings,” Ney clarified. “We designed equipment so that it could be operated by human beings.”)
It was then he decided to be a lawyer.
“I’ve always been interested in law,” he said. “I thought it was a general enough profession that I would be able to maintain my interests. I ended up with a very interesting practice, which was half in criminal defense work and the other half personal injury and domestic relations.”
Ed Kahn, special counsel for the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, said he did some pro bono work with Ney for the ACLU, fighting on behalf of university students expelled for protesting the Vietnam War.
“It was always a pleasure to work with him,” he recalled. “The fact that he’d done other things as a lawyer meant that he was mature in the level of his practice. He had a lot of experience.”
Ney said his book reflects how fortunate he feels to have been able to make so many career changes.
“In most western democracies, you can’t just say one day, ‘Well I’m going to be a designer. Gee, the space program sounds interesting. Now I want to become a lawyer.’ There isn’t that much flexibility in most countries,” he said. “I would just follow my muse wherever it took me and I never paid a great penalty for that. The U.S. is set up for that.”

Amendment 54 Fight Heads To Supreme Court Tomorrow

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:55:45 +0000

By Matt Masich, STATE BILL COLORADO
DENVER — Is Amendment 54 a valid way to fight pay-to-play politics or an unconstitutionally overbroad limit on political speech? The state’s highest court will hear oral arguments tomorrow in a case that will resolve that controversy.
Passed into law as a ballot initiative last year, Amendment 54 was widely seen as a move to curtail political contributions from labor unions. The amendment forbids recipients of large sole-source, or “no-bid,” government contracts from contributing to any political campaign in Colorado, except campaigns for federal office. The measure also forbids contract-holders’ immediate family members from contributing on their behalf.
Critics said the amendment’s donation ban violates First Amendment free speech rights. They also said the ban applies to more people in more situations than is warranted by any actual corruption.
Two groups of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the state challenging the amendment shortly after it took effect in January. One group is composed of labor unions, and the other includes nonprofit board members. They all claimed the amendment unjustly prevents them from making political donations.
The case appeared in Denver District Court. In June, Judge Catherine Lemon issued an injunction stopping Amendment 54 from taking effect until an appellate court could rule on its constitutionality. Lemon gave sharp criticism of the amendment in her findings of fact.
“Amendment 54 is so overbroad that it has substantially slipped to the moorings of its justification,” Lemon wrote.
The goal of preventing government corruption is legitimate, she said, but the amendment’s scope exceeds what would be necessary to accomplish that. For instance, the amendment bans applicable sole-source contract holders from donating not just to candidates for offices with authority over their contracts, but to any candidate at any level anywhere in Colorado.
“The connection between the breadth of this ban and its legitimate objective is not merely insufficiently close, it is indiscernible,” Lemon wrote.
In her interpretation, she found the amendment’s language about immediate family members of sole-source contract holders likely forbids them from making political contributions.

Supreme Court Takes Case
The state appealed Lemon’s injunction, and the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The high court considers it so important to resolve quickly that it fast-tracked the case, shortening the time the attorneys have to file briefs.
At oral arguments on Dec. 3, Maurie Knaizer of the attorney general’s office will represent the state. Bob Liechty of Cross & Liechty filed an amicus brief supporting the state’s position that the amendment is constitutional. Mark Grueskin of Isaacson Rosenbaum will argue for the union plaintiffs. Former Supreme Court Justice Jean Dubofsky will argue for the nonprofit plaintiffs.
Doug Friednash, who is working with Dubofsky representing the nonprofit plaintiffs, said Amendment 54 would have “a substantial impact” on the 2010 campaign season if the Supreme Court were to uphold it.
“[Nonprofit board members] are really forced to decide if they want to serve on boards, generally without pay, to serve the community. If so, are they willing to give up their political speech and association rights? It’s an unfortunate choice that they will be forced to make if this law is upheld,” Friednash said.
Former University of Denver Chancellor Daniel Ritchie, one of the plaintiffs Friednash represents, is the unpaid chief executive officer of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which has a sole-source contract of more than $100,000 with the city. Under the contribution ban, he would be unable to give money to state political campaigns.
Another plaintiff is Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown. Because he sits on the board of Visit Denver, which also has a large sole-source contract with the city, Brown would be barred from making contributions to his own self-funded campaign.
Liechty, who is arguing on behalf of Clean Government Colorado to get the amendment reinstated, said he agrees that it might be unconstitutional in situations such as Brown’s.
“We’ve argued you can make an exception in the amendment so that he is allowed to fund his own campaign. We don’t have a problem with that,” Liechty said.
But Dubofsky said the amendment is too flawed to fix.
“I am hoping the Colorado Supreme Court will say there are just too many problems with this, and we can’t construe it and construe it and construe it in ways that will make it constitutional,” Dubofsky said.
Liechty also disputes the plaintiffs’ assertion that banning contract holders from contributing to all state campaigns is excessively broad. The amendment was intended to be that broad in scope to prevent an East Coast practice called “wheeling,” in which money is given to one candidate who passes it to another to obscure the fact that influence is being bought.
“They just really overreached,” Dubofsky said. “The whole notion that this is a problem in this state is difficult to comprehend. We’ve never had a problem with this.”

Initiatives Supporting ‘Secret Ballots’ Get Colo. Supreme Court’s OK

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:22:01 +0000

By Don Knox, STATE BILL COLORADO
Three initiatives that would ask voters to retain a “secret ballot” provision in union elections should Congress pass the Employee Free Choice Act survived a legal challenge today at the Colorado Supreme Court.
The court ruled that the three measures, currently called “Initiatives 22, 23 and 24,” don’t violate the so-called “single subject rule” under current Colorado election law.
“The court fairly considered our appeal and found that the title board had done an adequate job of analyzing the single subject issue and conveying the measure in the title set,” said Mark Grueskin of the Denver law firm Isaacson Rosenbaum, who represents AFL-CIO lobbyist Philip Hayes, who filed the challenge. “We still think people will be confused by these measures: They purport to create exceptions to federal law and guarantee certain rights that will have to be litigated in the future.”

10.13.1

InitiativeChallenges

Colorado Supreme Court Case Announcements, 9/14/09

mmasich — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:15:41 +0000

Colorado Supreme Court Case Announcements, 9/14/09

In re: People in the Interest of A.H., Minor Child, 09SA22

mmasich — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:15:10 +0000

In re: People in the Interest of A.H., Minor Child, 09SA22

People v. Valenzuela, 08SC418

mmasich — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:14:00 +0000

People v. Valenzuela, 08SC418

Colorado Court of Appeals Case Announcements 9/10/09

mmasich — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:20:33 +0000

Colorado Court of Appeals Case Announcements 9/10/09