COLORADO, USA — A Colorado district attorney has lost her law license, in part for her handling of one of the state's most high-profile murder cases.
A panel under the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in an 83-page decision Tuesday that Linda Stanley can't practice law in Colorado anymore.
Stanley is the Republican district attorney for the 11th Judicial District, which includes Chaffee County. She brought a first-degree murder charge against Barry Morphew in the death of his wife Suzanne Morphew nearly a year after Suzanne went missing on Mother's Day 2020.
Stanley then dropped the charges against Barry Morphew days before the trial was set to start.
The Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel filed a complaint against Stanley in October 2023. It's the office in charge of investigating and prosecuting allegations of violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct by attorneys in Colorado.
"It's certainly a fall from grace," 9NEWS legal expert Scott Robinson said. "It's a pretty heavy blow if you spent years becoming a lawyer and years practicing law, to be disbarred is truly the ultimate punishment."
The complaint accuses her of making inappropriate comments about the case to media and says she showed up late to court and launched a secret investigation into the judge in the case because she disagreed with his rulings.
"We want to make sure that the people who are representing the state of Colorado, in criminal cases, are acting ethically, and the vast mass majority of prosecutors do just that," Robinson said. "And that's why it was really troublesome to learn about what Linda Stanley was accused of."
In a separate case, a judge dismissed the charges Stanley had brought against a man accused of killing a 10-month-old baby after Stanley did an interview with 9NEWS's partner station KRDO in Colorado Springs where she disparaged the suspect.
Tuesday's decision to disbar Stanley refers to her "dereliction of duty," saying she abused her position of trust and as a minister of justice.
"In the majority’s estimation, the Colorado legal profession and its prosecutorial community cannot rely on Respondent’s sense of integrity, probity, or righteousness to protect the public interest or to faithfully pursue justice for the citizens of the State of Colorado," the decision reads.
"In that role [of District Attorney], her obligation was not to win or to protect her reputation but to see justice done," The decision reads. "Instead, her unjustifiable extrajudicial statements in the Jacobs and Crawford cases led to the opposite result, prejudicing each criminal defendant and torpedoing the criminal cases against them. And her baseless decision to launch an in-house investigation of a judge presiding over a case that was close to trial prejudiced the administration of justice and abused her position of trust. She must be disbarred."
Iris Eytan, Barry Morphew's attorney and founder of the group Protect Ethical Prosecutors, sent a statement on the ruling Tuesday afternoon.
"This was absolutely the right outcome," Eytan's statement read in part. "Linda Stanley will no longer be permitted to use 'wield significant power' as a prosecutor. PEP hopes that this case serves as a springboard to protect ethical prosecutors and also for more unethical prosecutors to be held accountable. This includes PEP’s goal to deter unethical prosecutors from committing misconduct by allowing people who have been harmed by prosecutors to sued them for the irreparable damage they cause."
Stanley has seven days to appeal the ruling.