Thomas Patterson’s Free Speech Battle Against the Colorado Supreme Court

Thomas Patterson.
Thomas Patterson. / Photo from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

Free speech cases that go before the state and U.S. Supreme Courts tend to engender  significant attention, and that was true more than a century ago. In the first decade of the 20th century, a sitting U.S. Senator from Colorado challenged a contempt charge issued by the Colorado Supreme Court in a case that ultimately expanded free speech and due process rights. 

Patterson’s career spanned many professions and offices. Born in Ireland, his family moved to the United States when he was a child. He spent his childhood in New York and Indiana, and after serving with the Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, Patterson attended college and read law in an Indiana law office. 


Patterson was admitted to the bar in 1867, practicing in Crawfordsville, Indiana, for five years before packing up and moving to the then territory of Colorado. He established a law practice in Denver with future Colorado Gov. Charles Thomas and later became Denver city attorney.

Patterson’s career continued to rise. He was  elected as a territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress and later as a representative of the newly formed state. Patterson would lose reelection in 1878, but that became a boon for his law practice. According to the Thomas Patterson family papers, he became one of the most successful criminal lawyers in the state. 

But it wasn’t Patterson’s legal work that took him all the way to the nation’s high court. In 1892, Patterson purchased the Rocky Mountain News, which he turned into a bully pulpit for his political reform ideas, according to his family papers. He later purchased the Denver Times as well. 

The conflict came to a head in 1904, when the Colorado Supreme Court issued decisions relating to that year’s election, which has been called the most corrupt election in the state’s history. Patterson disagreed with those decisions, and he used his papers to broadcast his position.

According to an article in the Herald Democrat at the time, Patterson was accused of “casting slurs on the court in his papers, the Denver Times and the Rocky Mountain News.” 

Patterson didn’t deny what his papers published. Instead, he argued to the state’s high court his papers printed the truth. According to an article in the Daily Sentinel covering the case before the Colorado Supreme Court, “Never before in the history of Denver has such a crowd of notables attended a session of the supreme court.” 

Despite his defense, which included support from a former Colorado governor, Patterson was found in contempt and fined $1,000—equivalent to more than $30,000 today

Patterson wasn’t content to let the matter lie. A few months after the state court’s decision, he submitted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

But in a 7-2 opinion, the nation’s high court ruled it lacked jurisdiction to review the judgment in Patterson’s case. 

“We have scrutinized this case, but cannot say that it shows an infraction of rights under the Constitution of the United States, or discloses more than the formal appeal to that instrument in the answer to found the jurisdiction of the court,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the majority opinion. 

Justices John Marshall Harlan and David Brewer dissented, arguing the court should have heard the case.

While Patterson’s case was dismissed, his legal argument and the dissents written in the case ultimately prevailed. According to the Free Speech Center, the 1925 case of Gitlow v. New York adopted Harlan’s view on freedom of speech, and then it was expanded on in the 1931 case, Near v. Minnesota. 

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