Colorado State Court Administrator Steven Vasconcellos on Tuesday said he overlooked the discipline record of a retiring district court judge when he approved the jurist’s application for the senior judge program in 2018, then recently admonished the state’s judicial discipline commission for not telling the Judicial Branch about it.

That judge — former Adams County District Court Judge Thomas Ensor — was fired from the program on June 1, 2021, by Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian Boatright after the latter determined Ensor was one of several judges whose misconduct was detailed in a two-page memo that’s at the center of an ongoing judicial scandal.

Judicial Discipline Commission says Supreme Court lied, misled, misinformed public during probe

Vasconcellos was the department’s director of court services at the time of Ensor’s application and was one of four people to sign off on admitting him to the senior judge program — after the discipline commission told the department of the discipline, but offered no details behind it.

Vasconcellos said he goofed and should have inquired further.

“When reviewing the senior judge program application, I missed the notation that a private admonition had been assessed,” Vasconcellos wrote The Denver Gazette in an email. “I should have highlighted the matter directly with the State Court Administrator at the time for him to confer with the Chief Justice on how to move forward. I take responsibility for the mistake.”

Vasconcellos said he was similarly “unaware” of the admonishment when he wrongly accused the discipline commission in a letter last year of not making the discipline known to the department when it inquired about the judge’s background as part of the program’s application process. The commission pointed out Vasconcellos’ accusation in its own letter Monday to a legislative committee considering changes to the state’s discipline process.

Discipline commission says state court administrator falsely accused it of withholding information

Ensor did not immediately return several messages from The Denver Gazette seeking comment.

Retired judge Nathan “Ben” Coats was the chief justice at the time Ensor was approved and Christopher Ryan was the state court administrator. Each signed off on the application, as well.

Both men are at the core of the judicial scandal in which Ryan alleged Coats approved a contract to former Chief of Staff Mindy Masias in return for her not suing the department for sex discrimination. The two-page memo detailing the judicial misconduct was at the root of that decision, Ryan has said. An investigation by a firm hired by the department to look into the allegation determined there was no quid-pro-quo. The investigating firm, however, did not interview Ryan, Masias or Eric Brown, the memo’s author.

Senior judges are retired jurists who are contracted yearly by the department to fill in wherever needed. The judges are assigned duties by Vaconcellos’ office.

Boatright fired Ensor following a private telephone discussion the two had that same day, according to copies of emails and the firing letter obtained by The Denver Gazette through the department’s open-records rules. Ensor’s conduct or the specific reason for his firing are not detailed in those correspondence, but instead refer to the private conversation the two men had.

Several sources familiar with the case confirmed Ensor was the judge who was privately admonished by the discipline commission in May 2008. The admonishment was over “serious misconduct including displaying naked skin, the physical touching/rubbing of his chest on a woman’s back, and inappropriate commentary,” according to a report by Investigations Law Group released by the department last month. The judge’s conduct included a solicitation to “come sit on my lap,” according to ILG.

Ensor was referred to in the Masias memo as a judge who “exposed and rubbed his hairy chest on a female employee’s back” and who received no serious discipline for the conduct. The commission’s punishment was secret and by law not disclosed to the public, so Masias, even in her role as the department’s human resources director at the time, would not have known of the admonishment.

ILG concluded that “insufficient action occurred” by the discipline commission, calling the admonishment “the mildest sanction possible.”

ILG also wagged a finger at Vasconcellos and three others who signed off on Ensor’s application without inquiring what the admonishment was about. ILG did not identify Ensor by name in its report nor that Vasconcellos was one of the signatories of Ensor’s application. Vasconcellos signed the contract that hired ILG on behalf of the Judicial Department.

“From the perspective of Judicial administration, this Judge was allowed to serve as a Senior Judge after these events, despite at least four senior leaders at the State Court Administrator’s Office being notified that he had been the subject of a private admonition in the past,” ILG wrote. “None of these four individuals investigated what had taken place before approving him for the Senior Judge Program. Although I found no evidence to suggest that any of these individuals had actual knowledge of the facts underlying the admonition, it is striking that none of them asked any questions about it. Any one of these four could have, and should have, done more to unearth the facts underlying the private admonition the Commission on Judicial Discipline disclosed.”

Denver to increase its minimum wage to $17.29 an hour

Vasconcellos was named administrator, the highest civilian position in the judicial branch, in October 2019 after Ryan resigned following a newspaper investigation into the Masias contract.

ILG said although Ensor’s case was 15 years old, it “demonstrates failures in process and oversight as well as a failure to provide serious consequences on both the Commission on Judicial Discipline’s and Judicial Administration’s accounts. The Branch and the Commission on Judicial Discipline can and should do better to treat this kind of misbehavior seriously.”