Federal Criminal Defense in the District of Colorado

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

A federal charge in Colorado puts you in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado — one court for the entire state, anchored by the Alfred A. Arraj Courthouse in downtown Denver and staffed courthouses in Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, and Durango. Its bench, its local rules, and its docket — heavy on drug, firearms, and investment-fraud prosecutions — look nothing like Colorado state court, and defending a case here requires counsel who works in the federal system every day.

This guide explains how we defend federal cases in the District of Colorado — the seven-judgeship bench, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and its enforcement priorities, what the district’s own sentencing data shows, the Florence prison complex that shapes part of the docket, and how our firm appears in this court. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. handles federal criminal defense, appeals, and post-conviction matters nationwide. Our principal attorney, Elizabeth Franklin-Best, has appeared in more than 330 federal proceedings, including over 100 federal appeals, and is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuits. She was named a 2026 “Best Lawyer” in Appellate Practice by Best Lawyers in America and holds a Chambers USA 2026 ranking for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations. This page is part of our federal courts directory.

If federal agents have contacted you — or charges have already been filed in the District of Colorado — we offer a paid, one-hour initial consultation to go through the facts, the exposure, and the realistic paths forward.

Quick Answer: District of Colorado

Question	Answer
What court handles federal cases in Colorado?	The U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado — one district for the whole state, with the Alfred A. Arraj and Byron G. Rogers Courthouses in Denver and staffed locations in Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, and Durango.
How many judges sit on the court?	Seven authorized district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133, led as of mid-2026 by Chief Judge Daniel D. Domenico, plus senior judges and nine magistrate judges.
Who prosecutes federal cases there?	The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado — led as of mid-2026 by Peter McNeilly, a career prosecutor serving on an interim appointment rather than Senate confirmation.
What does the docket look like?	In FY2024, 382 people were sentenced: drug trafficking led at 30.9%, firearms ran 24.1% — nearly double the national share — and money laundering came in at twice the national rate.
Which circuit hears appeals?	The Tenth Circuit, headquartered blocks from the district courthouse in Denver, covering Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.
Where are post-conviction motions filed?	A Section 2255 motion attacking a District of Colorado conviction is filed in this district; Section 2241 petitions from ADX Florence, the other Florence facilities, and FCI Englewood are filed here too, because they sit in-district.
Can our firm appear in the District of Colorado?	Yes. The court’s bar is open by application to attorneys licensed and in good standing in any U.S. jurisdiction under D.C.COLO.LAttyR 3, and our practice is built for federal courts nationwide.
How do we start?	With a paid, one-hour initial consultation in which we review the investigation or charges and lay out a defense strategy specific to this district.

Key Takeaways

• The District of Colorado covers the whole state through seven authorized judgeships (28 U.S.C. § 133), with Chief Judge Daniel D. Domenico leading the bench as of mid-2026.
• Staffed courthouses sit in Denver (Arraj and Rogers), Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, and Durango; the statute also names Boulder, Montrose, Pueblo, and Sterling as seats where court is not regularly staffed.
• USSC data for FY2024 show 382 people sentenced here — drug trafficking 30.9%, firearms 24.1% (versus 13.2% nationally), and money laundering at double the national share.
• The district tried 14 criminal cases to verdict in FY2024 — a 3.7% trial rate against 2.8% nationally — so prosecutors and judges here are genuinely trial-tested.
• The U.S. Attorney’s Office is led as of mid-2026 by Peter McNeilly on an interim appointment; his career profile centers on fentanyl, cartel, and money-laundering prosecutions.
• The Florence prison complex — including ADX Florence, the federal supermax — and FCI Englewood are in-district, which channels Section 2241 petitions and prison-offense prosecutions into this court.
• Denver’s federal courthouse hosted the Oklahoma City bombing trial after a change of venue — a measure of the court’s capacity for high-profile criminal litigation.
• Rule 4(b) of the appellate rules gives a convicted defendant just 14 days from entry of judgment to notice an appeal to the Tenth Circuit.
• A Section 2255 motion challenging a conviction from this court must be filed in this court — appellate and post-conviction work is the core of our practice.

The District of Colorado at a Glance

The United States District Court for the District of Colorado is the federal trial court for all of Colorado. By statute, 28 U.S.C. § 85, court “shall be held” at Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, Durango, Grand Junction, Montrose, Pueblo, and Sterling — but the staffed reality is narrower. The court’s own locations list shows two downtown Denver courthouses (the Alfred A. Arraj Courthouse at 901 19th Street and the Byron G. Rogers Courthouse at 1929 Stout Street), plus courthouses in Colorado Springs, Grand Junction (the Wayne Aspinall Courthouse), and Durango, where the court uses space in the La Plata County Courthouse. The other statutory seats are not regularly staffed.

Every federal prosecution in the state is brought by the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, an office of more than 160 attorneys and staff headquartered in Denver. Appeals go to the Tenth Circuit — and here that means walking a few blocks: the circuit is headquartered in the Byron White United States Courthouse in Denver, making Colorado the only state in the circuit where the trial and appellate courts share a city.

The court runs on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure plus its own local rules — and the District of Colorado just refreshed them, with a new edition effective December 1, 2025. Two local habits matter most in practice here: the local criminal rules (the D.C.COLO.LCrR series) control the mechanics of filing and motions practice, and each judge publishes individual practice standards that function as binding chamber-specific rules. Counsel who has not read the assigned judge’s practice standards is already behind.

The Bench: Seven Judgeships, Two Downtown Denver Courthouses

Congress allots the District of Colorado seven district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133, and as of mid-2026 the court’s own roster shows all seven filled: Chief Judge Daniel D. Domenico and District Judges Philip A. Brimmer, Regina M. Rodriguez, Charlotte N. Sweeney, Nina Y. Wang, Gordon P. Gallagher, and S. Kato Crews. Two of the seven — Judge Gallagher and Judge Crews — came to the district bench from its own magistrate-judge corps, which tells you something about how seriously this court takes its magistrates.

The active judges are backed by an unusually deep reserve: seven senior district judges (John L. Kane, Lewis T. Babcock, Marcia S. Krieger, Robert E. Blackburn, William J. Martinez, R. Brooke Jackson, and Raymond P. Moore) continue to carry cases, and the court’s roster even lists Tenth Circuit judges — Timothy M. Tymkovich and Senior Circuit Judge David M. Ebel — who maintain District of Colorado dockets by designation. That cross-staffing is a Denver peculiarity: with the circuit courthouse a short walk away, appellate judges sometimes preside over trials in this district.

Nine magistrate judges — Scott T. Varholak, N. Reid Neureiter, Maritza Dominguez Braswell, Susan Prose, Kathryn A. Starnella, Timothy P. O’Hara, Cyrus Y. Chung, James M. Candelaria, and Richard T. Gurley — handle initial appearances, detention hearings, and much of the pretrial motion practice that shapes a criminal case before any district judge rules on the merits. We study the assigned judge’s practice standards, published opinions, and sentencing patterns before the first appearance, because that preparation changes how we frame everything from bond arguments to plea posture — though no honest lawyer predicts what a particular judge will do.

One more measure of this court: when the most scrutinized criminal case of the 1990s needed a fair forum, it came here. The district court granted a change of venue in the Oklahoma City bombing prosecution on February 19, 1996, and Timothy McVeigh was tried in Denver — a transfer the Tenth Circuit later said moved the trial out of “the eye of the emotional storm.” United States v. McVeigh, 153 F.3d 1166 (10th Cir. 1998). Few district courts have absorbed litigation of that magnitude.

Federal Criminal Cases in the District

The District of Colorado handles the full range of federal criminal matters — white-collar offenses and fraud, drug and firearms cases, and other federal prosecutions. A federal case in the district generally moves through a recognizable sequence.

Most cases begin with an investigation by a federal agency, sometimes signaled by a target letter or a grand jury subpoena. Formal charges follow, typically by indictment. After an initial appearance and arraignment, the case proceeds through pretrial litigation and discovery, and is then resolved either by a negotiated plea agreement or by trial. A conviction is followed by sentencing under the federal framework. The firm’s federal criminal process hub walks through each stage in detail.

At every one of those stages, we are building the record that the District of Colorado’s judges — and, if necessary, the Tenth Circuit — will eventually review: preserving objections, litigating suppression and discovery motions, pressure-testing the government’s loss and drug-quantity theories, and trying the case when trial serves the client better than the deal on the table.

Applied Insight: Colorado’s federal docket is unusually trial-active — 14 criminal cases went to verdict here in FY2024, a 3.7 percent trial rate against 2.8 percent nationally. That matters during plea negotiations: prosecutors in a district that actually tries cases price their offers differently, and defense counsel who can credibly prepare for trial negotiates from a stronger position. The preparation has to start during the investigation, not after indictment.

What Federal Prosecutors Charge in Colorado

As of mid-2026, the office is led by Peter McNeilly, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Colorado since 2014 who previously served as Deputy U.S. Attorney and as chief of the office’s Transnational Organized Crime and Money Laundering Section. He holds the position on an interim appointment — the Justice Department’s June 2026 listing of U.S. Attorneys does not show a Senate-confirmed appointee for Colorado — and his Justice Department profile emphasizes fentanyl prosecutions, cartel-related organized crime, and violent-crime reduction.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s FY2024 statistical packet for the district puts numbers on the docket: 382 people sentenced. Drug trafficking led at 118 cases (30.9 percent), followed by firearms at 92 (24.1 percent — nearly double the 13.2 percent national share). Robbery ran 7.6 percent against a 2.1 percent national figure, a signature of Hobbs Act and bank-robbery enforcement along the Front Range. On the white-collar side, fraud, theft, and embezzlement accounted for 25 sentencings and money laundering for 16 — 4.2 percent of the docket, exactly twice the national share, consistent with an office that maintains a dedicated money-laundering section.

Denver’s financial corridor keeps investment-fraud enforcement steady. The clearest recent example is the Mediatrix Capital prosecution: a federal jury in Denver convicted two former trading-firm executives in May 2024 on fourteen wire-fraud counts and conspiracy, and in November 2024 Judge William J. Martinez sentenced Bryant Sewall to 23 years — one of the longest white-collar sentences in recent district history, per the U.S. Attorney’s Office announcement. For anyone under investigation by the SEC, the FBI, or IRS Criminal Investigation in Colorado, the lesson is sobering: this office takes complex trading-fraud cases to verdict, and sentencing exposure after trial can be measured in decades.

ADX Florence, FCI Englewood, and the Prison Docket

The Bureau of Prisons operates a cluster of federal facilities inside this district. The Federal Correctional Complex at Florence, in Fremont County south of Colorado Springs, includes three institutions — ADX Florence (the administrative-maximum penitentiary, the most restrictive prison in the federal system), USP Florence High, and FCI Florence — and FCI Englewood sits in Littleton, just outside Denver, per the Bureau of Prisons’ facility listings. We discuss these facilities clinically because they shape real litigation in this court.

Two consequences follow. First, habeas petitions under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 — challenges to how a sentence is being executed, including credit calculations and certain conditions claims — must be filed in the district of confinement. For anyone held at Florence or Englewood, that district is the District of Colorado, no matter where the underlying conviction happened. Second, offenses committed inside those facilities are prosecuted here: prison offenses were 1.8 percent of the district’s FY2024 sentencings, roughly two and a half times the 0.7 percent national share.

Our federal post-conviction practice regularly serves people held in-district, and we handle compassionate release motions as well — nationally, judges granted 14.1 percent of those motions in FY2025 (394 of 2,795, per the Sentencing Commission’s full-year data), and the difference between the granted and denied motions is usually the quality of the record counsel builds. Representing clients at ADX in particular demands planning around visiting, communication, and filing logistics that simply do not exist elsewhere in the system.

Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters

Sentencing in this district is not the end of the road. Convictions go up to the Tenth Circuit — physically just blocks away in the Byron White Courthouse — and the deadline is unforgiving: Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) allows only 14 days from entry of judgment to file the notice of appeal. Given the district’s firearms-heavy docket, it is worth knowing that the Tenth Circuit has rejected post-Bruen Second Amendment attacks on the felon-in-possession statute, reaffirming § 922(g)(1) in Vincent v. Bondi, 127 F.4th 1263 (10th Cir. 2025) — so a § 922(g) appeal here needs a more individualized theory than a facial constitutional challenge. The Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234 (U.S. June 18, 2026), does not change that: it struck the drug-user firearm bar of Section 922(g)(3) only as applied and expressly declined to decide the felon-in-possession bar of Section 922(g)(1), leaving Vincent in control of felon-in-possession appeals in this circuit.

Collateral attack follows a different map. A motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 — the federal prisoner’s vehicle for ineffective-assistance and other constitutional claims — must be filed in the district of conviction, which means District of Colorado judgments are challenged right here. Our post-conviction practice, along with compassionate release work, is the deepest part of what we do, and because every filing turns on federal law and a paper record, geography is no obstacle: we brief and argue these matters in districts across the country.

How the Firm Practices in This Court

The District of Colorado makes appearing here straightforward for experienced out-of-state counsel — and it does so differently than most districts. Under D.C.COLO.LAttyR 3(a), the court’s bar is open by application to any attorney licensed, on active status, and in good standing in any state, federal territory, or the District of Columbia; only members of that bar may appear in a case under the court’s appearance rules. In other words, rather than case-by-case pro hac vice motions, this court invites qualified counsel from anywhere in the country to join its bar outright.

That open-bar structure reflects something true everywhere but explicit in Denver: federal criminal practice is national. The statutes, the Sentencing Guidelines, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the constitutional doctrines are identical in every district — what changes locally is the bench, the prosecutors, and the practice standards, all of which can be learned by counsel who studies them deliberately, the way we do for every new court.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuits, including the Tenth, where she served as counsel of record in United States v. Joseph, 108 F.4th 1273 (10th Cir. 2024). Her record spans more than 100 federal appeals and a nationwide post-conviction practice — Section 2255 motions, First Step Act Section 404 resentencings, and Amendment 821 and compassionate-release litigation — and our work in this district concentrates on exactly that: the trial defense, Tenth Circuit appeals, and collateral litigation that District of Colorado cases generate. For matters arising elsewhere in the circuit, we maintain companion guides to the District of Utah, the District of Wyoming, and the District of Kansas.

Frequently Asked Questions

Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer

Whether you are under investigation along the Front Range, indicted in Denver, weighing a Tenth Circuit appeal, or pursuing post-conviction relief from a District of Colorado judgment, the analysis starts with a paid, one-hour initial consultation — a focused working session on your facts, your exposure under this district’s sentencing patterns, and the strategy we would actually pursue.