Colorado Newsline: Colorado law says state criminal courts must offer livestreams of their proceedings, but the state’s top judge has little use for that mandate.

Citing abuse of the livestream feature, Monica Márquez, the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, last week ordered a 90-day pause on the requirement that courts livestream their proceedings. It was a sweeping, unilateral elimination of transparency, which was especially alarming given that the activities at issue involve the awesome power of the state to deprive residents of their liberty.

Márquez’s very authority to take the action is uncertain. The law describes various circumstances under which a court might be exempted from the livestreaming mandate, but those circumstances are supposed to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not as part of a blanket directive to every court. The law explicitly says its livestream requirements “supersede any … judicial guidance, or chief justice directive limiting remote public observation of criminal courts.”

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