A former combat veteran and Colorado public defender is suing his former employer for firing him after he told a court that his excessive felony caseload was too high to adequately represent his clients.
Travis Weiner was fired earlier this year from his defender job in Weld County after repeatedly telling his supervisor that he didn’t feel like he could effectively fulfill his obligation to clients because of his burgeoning caseload.
Last week, Weiner filed a whistleblower lawsuit under the Colorado State Employee Protection Act.
Weiner said when he was in county court, he usually had between 200 to 275 misdemeanor cases at a time and then when he was promoted to state court, he would carry usually 100 felony cases at one time from the Greeley office.
In 2023, Weiner began telling his supervisors he didn’t think it was ethical to have such large caseloads for the poorest clients, according to the complaint.
Weiner worked as a public defender from 2019 to 2024 — all of that time in the Weld County office.
He shared his concerns with the entire staff at all-staff meetings. And when Weiner met one-on-one with his supervisor, she told him, according to the complaint, that he needed to “triage” his work, which meant in some of the cases of lesser import, cutting corners, Weiner said.
This included being encouraged to represent clients without fully evaluating the entire case file, including watching all the body-worn camera footage, Weiner said.
The supervisor told Weiner that the triage strategy didn’t violate the law, but she couldn’t ever provide any legal authority that supported her position, the complaint said.
A Rand Corporation and American Bar Association study released in 2023 put together detailed calculations about the number of hours a public defender would have to give to each type of case in order to provide “reasonably effective assistance of counsel.” Weiner said he calculated that he would have to work more than 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no travel to meet the minimum hours of his caseload work.
He said the entire criminal justice system is complicit in the excessive caseloads for public defenders throughout Colorado.
“This is a problem, which the district attorneys, the judiciary and the public at large is complicit, because everybody knows this is the case. Judges get upset when you call a spade a spade and you say how monstrous this is,” Weiner said. “Maybe the district attorneys, the judges and the public defender leadership wouldn’t be so OK with the status quo if it was them who was charged with a crime.”
Eventually, Weiner filed two motions at the end of last year and the beginning of this year to withdraw from two of his clients’ cases because he said he couldn’t fulfill his legal obligations to do an ethically sufficient job.
He said he chose clients who were out of custody, so they wouldn’t get stuck in jail awaiting a new assigned attorney, and he also said he sought their permission before filing the motions. In those motions, Weiner said he had a workload of between 2.5 and 3 times what national standards dictated an attorney could competently handle.
He said he didn’t believe that he had yet violated any specific client’s right to effective counsel, but he felt like it was only a matter of time before he unintentionally did so.
Weiner said he thought the triage suggestion was illegal and unconstitutional.
When the first motion was filed, Weiner’s boss moved to have the motion withdrawn and asked the judge to transfer the case to her. The judge granted it. When he filed his second motion, echoing much of the same concerns, his boss filed a notice that the motion was unauthorized, according to the complaint.
In a meeting after that second motion, Weiner was issued a corrective action that forbade him from ever filing another motion to withdraw from any case without approval from a supervisor. She said the issue “was not up for debate.”
Ultimately, Weiner was fired. He now works at the public defender’s office in Taos, New Mexico. The whistleblower complaint notes Weiner never received anything less than “successful” or “exceptional” on his performance evaluations and that bosses consistently noted that he “had an energy for work and was contagious and inspiring to others.”
Weiner is an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq and was awarded a number of commendations, including a Purple Heart. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant before he went to college.
“This is not about me. I could be anybody. I could be any public defender. There are defenders I have a lot of respect for that disagree with this method of trying to deal with this issue,” he said. “But we’re due to a national reckoning on this issue and I hope this contributes to it.”
Megan Ring, the state’s public defender, is a named defendant in Weiner’s lawsuit. She didn’t immediately respond to comment on the filing.
