Officials not told about pornography on shared laptop
A laptop computer that rotated among the judges of Adams and Broomfield counties’ judicial district and contained dozens of pornographic images was never turned over to law enforcement for investigation or reported up the chain of command when the images were discovered, The Denver Post has learned.
Reasons var y for why law enforcement was not involved at the start to determine whether the images were illegal. The former administrator of the 17th Judicial District Benjamin Stough said he was ordered by his boss, the chief judge, to make the images “go away” after he learned of them. The nowretired chief judge, Patrick Murphy, says it was Stough who handled the incident and that he was merely following his subordinate’s advice not to be concerned about it.
The incident comes to light months after Stough lost his battle for unemployment benefits. He was fired last year for not reporting the matter to authorities when it happened or detailing what he did with the pornography when asked.
Stough says Murphy ordered him to destroy the images after learning the laptop had been assigned to a magistrate and friend at the time the pornography was downloaded, according to documents obtained by The Post that detail the incident. He has said it was unclear whether the images were of children and maintains Murphy should have ordered them investigated.
Murphy told The Post that it was actually Stough who recommended not reporting the images and he recalls Stough assuring him they did not depict minors.
Details surrounding the allegation are laid out in several state records obtained by The Post including a whistleblower complaint Stough filed with the State Personnel Board in August 2019 when he was fired and recordings of hearings held regarding his claims for unemployment insurance benefits months after ward.
The password-protected laptop is rotated weekly among judges and magistrates in the district for evening and weekend duties such as issuing police warrants for searches or emergency custody orders. Stough said a female judge in the rotation reported the images to the district’s computer technicians, who reported it to Stough. He then took the laptop directly to Murphy, according to the documents.
While Murphy recalls the exchange differently,
Stough said he told Murphy he was unsure whether the images depicted children. Stough said that although the senior judge never viewed the images, he “directed me to ‘make it go away'” after the magistrate said they weren’t his, according to the whistleblower complaint.
The complaint was dismissed because Stough was an at-will employee and not covered by the state’s career service rules.
“I believe Judge Murphy covered it up ,” s tough said during an August 2019 interview with the current chief judge who later fired him, according to a transcript obtained by The Post. “He had a duty to call law enforcement, to tr y to find out (what) those images were, who these people were, and ascertain their age. He didn’t do it.”
Stough said he kept quiet because he feared for his job if he spoke out.
The best anyone can recall, the incident occurred around Christmas 2016 or 2017 and only recently came to light as Stough unsuccessfully battled for unemployment benefits. He was fired last year from his $175,000 job for failing to report the matter to state authorities or law enforcement when it happened and for not disclosing what he did with the pornography. That firing came under the current chief judge, Emily Anderson.
Murphy, a former assistant federal prosecutor who served 11 years on the bench, said he would never have sought to destroy evidence. “There absolutely was not a conspiracy to hide anything whatsoever,” Murphy told The Post.
The images were discovered after the computer had been assigned to former Adams County Chief Magistrate Peter Stapp. Stapp denied any knowledge of the images or how they got onto the laptop when confronted by Murphy and Stough, the whistleblower documents show.
The former magistrate, however, told The Post that he told the two men that it was likely teenaged relatives who visited the pornographic websites when he loaned them the laptop during a family gathering over the holidays. He said Stough told him not to be concerned about it.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not a big deal,
I’ll just take care of it,'”
Stapp told The Post, adding he did not confront those relatives or ask if it was them. “I assumed it was the end of it.”
Stapp said all he saw was a list of websites from Stough, not any images. He said the next he heard about the incident was from the attorney general’s office in connection with Stough’s unemployment claim last year.
Stapp agreed that he, like all other judges and district employees, had signed a directive from the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court restricting access to judicial laptops to employees only, as well as a requirement to report any misuse or unauthorized access.
Both Murphy and Stapp have since retired from the bench. Murphy currently works with the Judicial Arbiter Group, a company made up of retired judges who provide alternative dispute resolution and other legal services. Stapp runs his own legal mediation ser vice in Denver.
The first time Stough disclosed the episode was in March 2019 when the Judicial Department’s director of human resources told him Murphy was firing Stough for unrelated reasons, according to the whistleblower complaint. Stough replied that he would file an age-discrimination lawsuit over his firing, then revealed he would also send information about the pornography incident to the FBI.
A laptop was sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in March 2019, but it turned out to be the one that replaced the laptop they sought, according to CBI reports obtained by The Post via an open-records request. The laptop used by Stapp had already been recycled and its hard drive removed. It’s unclear if the hard drive was destroyed or lay among hundreds scheduled to be incinerated.