Judge Matsch Podcast Part 1: Cases involving constitutional issues

Tales from the 10th

Judge Richard P. Matsch (1930-2019) served as a United States District Judge for the District of Colorado from 1974 to 2019. He is best known for his service as the trial judge in charge of the criminal trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted in 1997 for their roles in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Before Matsch’s service as a federal judge, he worked as a lawyer in private practice in Denver, a federal prosecutor, and a bankruptcy referee and bankruptcy judge in Colorado. Matsch grew up in Burlington, Iowa, worked in his father’s grocery store there, and attended a junior college and then the University of Michigan for college and law school. After law school, he served in the U.S. Army from 1953-55 around the end of the Korean War doing counterintelligence work in South Korea.

In describing his career as a public servant, Judge Matsch quoted George Bernard Shaw:

I’m of the opinion that my life belongs to the community. And as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no brief candle for me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got hold of for a moment and want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

The full oral history interview of Judge Matsch in 2018 by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Bruce Campbell (retired), from which these podcasts are excerpted, is available at the Historical Society’s website at: https://www.10thcircuithistory.org/oral-histories

First podcast episode:

In the first podcast episode, Judge Matsch discussed his work on the Keyes v. School District No. 1 case from 1973 to 1995, implementing the U.S. Supreme Court’s direction in 1973 to have a federal judge oversee desegregation “root and branch” of the Denver Public Schools through busing of students. Ultimately in 1995, Judge Matsch held that the vestiges of past discrimination by the school district had been eliminated to the extent practicable, and ended the mandatory busing of students in Denver Public Schools.

Matsch also discussed in this episode several other cases that involved constitutional issues including free speech and the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment, and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Judge Matsch’s 1977 ruling that called for girls to be able participate in a Colorado high school soccer program comparable to boys soccer, he noted:

Any notion that young women are so inherently weak, delicate or physically inadequate that the State must protect them from the folly of participation in vigorous athletics is a cultural anachronism unrelated to reality. The Constitution does not permit the use of governmental power to control or limit cultural changes or to prescribe masculine and feminine roles.

Hoover v. Meiklejohn, 430 F.Supp. 164 (D. Colo. 1977).