On a July morning in a Denver courtroom, District Judge Demetria Trujillo took a senior prosecutor to task.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Daniel Cohen willfully violated discovery rules and failed to disclose information in a timely manner to the defense attorney for a man facing more than two dozen felony charges related to possessing child sexual abuse material, the judge found on what was supposed to be the first day of the man’s jury trial.
“This is a district attorney who is a supervisor in the Denver District Attorney’s Office. There is no excuse for not understanding or effectuating the obligations under Rule 16,” Trujillo said, according to a transcript of the July 22 hearing obtained by The Denver Post.
“The arguments and excuses that have been provided by counsel carry no weight, given the history and number of times that this district attorney has been on notice,” she continued. “…And while the office itself has endeavored to make changes to ensure that discovery is timely produced, this district attorney has either ignored the changes within the office or doesn’t, again, understand them.”
Trujillo suppressed evidence in the case as a punitive sanction for Cohen’s rule violation, which delayed the trial. But the trial couldn’t be rescheduled within a statutory deadline, so the judge dismissed all charges, according to court records that The Post obtained before the case was quickly sealed and blocked from public view.
The sanction of a high-ranking prosecutor — which came after judges found discovery violations in at least seven other cases brought by the Denver District Attorney’s Office since February and dismissed charges in at least three of those cases — is part of a shifting legal landscape in which Colorado judges are becoming more likely to reduce charges or dismiss cases as a sanction for prosecutors’ discovery violations, legal experts said.
Discovery, governed by Rule 16 of the Colorado Rules of Criminal Procedure, is the process through which prosecutors are required to share evidence and information with defense attorneys so that the defense can prepare for trial.
Judges dismissed two Denver cases — including one handled by Cohen — mid-trial over discovery violations in February in an incident that also led to a senior prosecutor’s departure from the office. Discovery violations prompted Denver judges in March to dismiss a felony charge of assault on a peace officer, and, in June, a failure-to-register charge in a different case. A Jefferson County judge in November dismissed the criminal charges against a driver in a fatal crash over discovery violations by the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office.
“Judges seem more willing to issue actual sanctions,” said Amelia Power, a Denver-based criminal defense attorney. “They are actually dismissing charges, dismissing cases — it seems like judges are getting sick of these.”
The shift can be traced to Linda Stanley, the now-disbarred former elected district attorney in the 11th Judicial District in central Colorado, who bungled the first murder prosecution of Barry Morphew in the death of his wife.
In April 2023, Fremont County District Court Judge Kaitlin Turner sanctioned Stanley’s office for egregious discovery violations by reducing a first-degree murder charge against defendant Joseph Tippet to a second-degree murder charge. That sanction was upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court in December 2023, affirming the authority of judges across the state to dismiss cases or counts to punish prosecutors for repeat discovery violations.
That kickstarted a change in judges’ approaches, defense attorneys said. In the past, judges typically responded to most discovery violations by delaying cases to give defense attorneys enough time to prepare despite the violations. Sometimes, judges suppressed evidence as a sanction. After the Tippet case, sanctions started to shift toward dismissing charges or whole cases, attorneys said.
“Discovery violations have been a long-standing issue with the Denver DA’s office, so there is some element of just fatigue at the frequency and the gravity of those violations for how long they have continued,” said Erika Unger, legal director at Bread and Roses Legal Center. “The Tippet case… made it clear that deterrent sanctions are appropriate to actually deter the conduct, not just cure whatever the violation is in the individual case.”
Denver District Attorney John Walsh told The Post he is committed to “addressing current discovery challenges” and noted that prosecutors across jurisdictions are facing difficulties related to voluminous discovery materials.
“This is an office that actually has an office culture of disclosure and transparency,” he said. “One thing I would emphasize is that virtually all of the discovery issues that have arisen in cases have come to light because prosecutors have identified a discovery issue and immediately taken steps to disclose it. …Does that mean we get it right every time? Obviously not.”
Prosecutors across the state appear to have taken notice of the uptick in serious sanctions.
In July, the Colorado District Attorneys Council asked the group that sets rules for criminal court cases to consider extending the deadline for discovery from 21 days to 35 days after a defendant’s first appearance in court.
The DAs council also asked that defense attorneys be required to confer with prosecutors before seeking sanctions for discovery violations, which they said would “reduce unnecessary adversarial conflict and encourage professional collaboration between parties.”
“This change should reduce attorney and court time spent on discovery disputes because parties will have an opportunity to identify and locate any missed items and correct any such issues more efficiently than in the current process, which draws heavily on judicial resources,” Tom Raynes, the Colorado District Attorneys Council’s executive director, wrote in a July 18 letter.
When Trujillo sanctioned Cohen in July, the judge said the Tippet case was meant to “wake up” prosecutors who were repeatedly missing discovery deadlines.
Cohen did not return a request for comment on this story. He was accused of violating discovery by failing to provide 33 body-worn camera videos, 24 police reports, six transcripts and all crime-scene photographs, according to court records.
In a June court hearing in the case, Cohen said that a law enforcement officer originally did not provide evidence to him, and that when he did receive that material, another person in the office failed to disclose the evidence to defense attorneys as he’d instructed. He said he complied with the “spirit of Rule 16” and that sanctions were unnecessary.
“There were discovery issues that, certainly as the court can see, were not something that I was withholding evidence or trying to hide the ball or playing ‘got you’ with the defense,” he said in court in June.
Cohen is no longer a chief deputy district attorney in Denver and, as of Aug. 4, was working as a senior deputy district attorney, office spokesman Matt Jablow said. Jablow did not answer a question about whether the demotion was the result of disciplinary action and said only that it was part of an office “reorganization.”
Walsh declined to discuss particular cases or prosecutors, but said that ensuring prosecutors meet their discovery obligations is his “No. 1 priority to address in the office right now.”
“It is crucial to the fairness of trials and the whole criminal justice system,” he said. “We embrace that. It is not something we do grudgingly. It is a core part of what a prosecutor has got to do.”
Since Walsh became district attorney in January, the office has made changes aimed at improving the discovery process, he said, including requiring paralegals to review cases at the start for potential gaps in discovery materials and setting up internal “checkpoints” around discovery deadlines — tasks in the office’s software that attorneys and staff must confirm they have completed.
Walsh also worked with the Denver Police Department to refresh training around providing discovery materials to prosecutors, and identified some repeat problems around missing body-worn camera footage and 911 calls in which the materials were not all linked to the same incident with a consistent incident number. Multiple incident numbers meant prosecutors sometimes did not learn about the materials until too late in the case, he said.
Denver police have recently put a system in place to fix that numbering issue, he said, and the DA’s office can now also directly access the 911 call database to pull material directly as needed.
“It’s clear that the judges have been following Tippet very closely and have been looking at it,” Walsh said. “That opinion really focuses on whether the judge feels there is a pattern or practice of discovery violations either with a particular prosecutor or the office, and that opens the door to remedies to serve as an incentive to fix the problem. I don’t think there is any question that since Tippet came out, judges have been taking that very seriously.”
The shift toward more severe sanctions has also encouraged defense attorneys to pay more attention to discovery violations, which now suddenly have teeth, legal experts said.
“Within the defense community, including the public defender’s office, there has been more effort about trying to document patterns and practices where they exist,” said James Karbach, spokesman for the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender. “I think we are doing a better job of that today than we were years ago.”
The effort to show patterns of discovery violations can be hindered by the sealing of cases in which judges have sanctioned prosecutors. Sealing a case blocks it from public view, and court staff are prohibited by law from acknowledging that the sealed case even existed.
All four of the Denver DA’s cases that The Post identified in which judges dismissed charges for discovery violations have been sealed. The secrecy is “depriving the public and other counsel of transparency (into) what’s happening in the courtroom,” Laura Menninger, the defense attorney in the Cohen-led case, said in court in July, according to a transcript.
Attorneys can seek to unseal cases for good cause — like to reveal a discovery violation, Unger said, but they have to know the case exists to even get that far. It’s also hard to know how effective that unsealing approach is: even the motions to unseal are filed in secret, because they are filed into a sealed case, she said.
The shift toward more severe sanctions for discovery violations comes as discovery materials themselves have rapidly ballooned, prosecutors said.
Over the last few years, there’s been a massive jump in the amount of evidence associated with any given case, driven largely by significant amounts of police body-worn camera footage and digital evidence like cellphone data.
In the Denver DA’s office, the amount of cellphone data that staff reviews is on track this year to quadruple from what the office reviewed in 2023, Walsh said, growing from 12 terabytes of information in all of 2023 to 23.5 terabytes in just the first half of 2025.
The sheer volume of information can mean that some pieces of evidence are unintentionally missed, said Raynes, the director of the Colorado District Attorneys Council.
The state’s discovery management system, created by the DAs council in 2016, just before body-worn camera footage exploded, is not well-designed to handle the large amount of video footage that now goes through it, and is in need of “total retooling,” he said.
“That is a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “That would never explain willful or intentional conduct.”
State lawmakers this year created an 11-member task force to study the state’s discovery management system. The task force is required to publish a report by Nov. 1 on how the system should be improved and how much it will cost to do so.
“The discovery is the foundation of a fair trial, so we’ve got to make this work,” Raynes said. “As DAs, we don’t want to tolerate intentional violations of any rule, statute or ethical rule, we don’t want that happening in any situation. Because anything unethical from our side betrays trust in the entire system.”
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