Judge Gregory clears docket for 2025

Young County District Judge Phillip Gregory took the oath of office on Jan. 2 for his first full term, after taking over his post from retiring Judge Stephen Bristow who retired last year after 11 years on the bench and 12 years as district attorney.

Judge Gregory, who served asa defense attorney and assistant district attorney, spend much of the first year after his appointment last September clearing long-delayed cases from his docket implementing new bail and family law rules and pressing for an increase in pay for public defenders.

The Enterprise talked to Judge Gregory after his swearing in to learn about his priorities for 2025.

Judge Gregory: I’ve got to get the criminal aspect of my court up and going because i’m just now starting to clear out the conflict cases that I had because I was assistant district attorney for that eight year period. The last two or three rounds of indictments that the DA’s office has done have been 90 to 95 percent non conflict casese so Ive got to hit the ground running with all of those so that I can start trying to work those calendaring… so I can move those in a timely fashion so people have their day in court.

My first jury trials are popping up in the next few weeks.

On the civil side of it,... we’ve already had two rounds of dismissal dockets where we have been able to clean out cases where … nobody is doing anything with them. Some of those cases have been closed out and other cases we’ve got those under scheduling orders so we can move the civil and family cases a lot faster than we have been.

To give you an example ... we had 104 new family law cases filed in but we got rid of 108. So we actually bit into the new filings.