A two-week disciplinary hearing began Monday for 11th Judicial District Attorney Linda Stanley, the Colorado prosecutor accused of violating professional rules for attorneys when she prosecuted Barry Morphew in the 2020 murder of his wife.

State authorities alleged during the proceeding in Denver that Stanley, the sitting elected district attorney for Chaffee, Custer, Fremont and Park counties, made inappropriate comments to members of the media during the Morphew prosecution, failed to capably lead the district attorney’s office and attempted to retaliate against the judge presiding over the Morphew case.

Jonathan Blasewitz, an attorney for the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, called the Morphew prosecution a “debacle” that was left in “shambles” because of Stanley’s mismanagement.

“This case is about a ship with a captain who never manned the bridge,” Blasewitz said. “Instead of navigating the ship and keeping it on course, the captain was engaged with unethical commentary with members of the media … and the ship that crashed was a first-degree murder case.”

Stanley’s attorney, Steve Jensen, countered in court Monday that Stanley wasn’t an unethical or poor leader, but rather did the best she could in a judicial district with very limited staffing and resources.

It is highly unusual for a disciplinary case against a sitting elected district attorney to proceed to a public hearing. Stanley could lose her license to practice law if Presiding Disciplinary Judge Bryon Large and two hearing board members sustain the allegations of professional misconduct against her.

During the trial-like disciplinary hearing at the Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse, attorneys for the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel — the agency that disciplines Colorado attorneys for violating professional standards — began presenting witness testimony to support the allegations they levied against Stanley.

Stanley is accused of violating seven rules of conduct, with five violations occurring during the Morphew prosecution. He was charged with murder in 2021, a year after his wife, Suzanne Morphew, 49, disappeared from the family’s Chaffee County home on May 10, 2020.

Stanley dropped all charges against Morphew in 2022. He has maintained his innocence and is not facing any charges in connection with his wife’s death.

Investigators in September discovered Suzanne Morphew’s body in a shallow grave near Moffat, and a coroner later determined her death to be a homicide, finding she died with a cocktail of animal tranquilizers in her body.The investigation into Suzanne’s killing is now being handled by 12th Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly, since her body was found in that jurisdiction.

Jensen argued during his opening statement Monday that Stanley’s comments to the media about the Morphew case were innocuous and that an inquiry into the personal life of the judge on the case was not used to retaliate against him. The Morphew prosecution was Stanley’s first-ever homicide prosecution in her career, Jensen said.

“She did not neglect her duties,” Jensen said. “She did not lack due diligence. … She provided adequate supervision. There is no basis for those charges.”

Jensen added that an interview that Stanley gave to a Colorado Springs TV news station — which accounts for two of the allegations against her — was supposed to be considered “off-the-record.” Stanley believed her comments would not be aired on TV, he said, even though she was wearing a microphone and being recorded.

Once the hearing concludes, the evidence will be weighed by a disciplinary panel of three: Large, Glenwood Springs attorney Sherry Caloia and Melinda Harper, a member of the public. If the board sustains the allegations, it then will determine the sanction, up to disbarment.

The two-week hearing is expected to include testimony from John Suthers, a former Colorado attorney general and U.S. attorney for Colorado; former Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett; multiple prosecutors and investigators who worked on the Morphew case; and former 11th Judicial District Judge Ramsey Lama, who presided over the case.

Stanley sat quietly at the defense table Monday, at one point appearing to check emails on her laptop and at other times writing notes on a yellow legal pad.

The first witness called was attorney Jeff Lindsey, the initial lead prosecutor on the Morphew case and the current unopposed candidate to replace Stanley as 11th Judicial District attorney.

He said the small office was overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the investigation and he could not handle all of the work alone.

Stanley was frequently out of the office, was not quick to respond to emails and was “hard to find,” Lindsey testified. He left the job after a few months, resigning because he “physically and mentally could not keep up.”

“I told her I couldn’t do it anymore,” he said, describing a meeting with Stanley in which she scrolled on her phone as he spoke. “… She said, ‘It sounds like you are trying to get off a sinking ship.’ ”

On cross-examination, Jensen sought to show Stanley properly supported Lindsey and that his workload was not without precedent. Lindsey acknowledged that Stanley at times met weekly to discuss the Morphew case, and that before the preliminary hearing, she arranged for Lindsey to take a week away from his other work to focus on the case.

He also agreed that she sought a significant budget increase for the district attorney’s office that was denied by the judicial district’s county commissioners.

There was never a full-time prosecutor assigned to the Morphew case, Lindsey testified.

After Lindsey left the job, a handful of attorneys worked on a part-time, contract basis to prosecute the case, testified Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Alex Walker. He previously worked as investigator for the district attorney’s office and has filed more than 120 search warrants in the investigation into Suzanne Morphew’s death, he testified.

He said it was unclear for some time after Lindsey’s departure who was in charge of the prosecution, and the part-time attorneys who followed Lindsey struggled to grasp the fundamentals of the sprawling case.

“We did anything and everything we could to get them up to speed, guide them,” Walker said. “But it was landing on deaf ears. Names weren’t remembered, timelines weren’t remembered, data wasn’t remembered. It was like we were repeating the same things.”