A sitting Powell City councilman apparently suggested Wyoming start “hanging bad judges” one day after a Casper-based judge on Friday blocked the state’s most recent abortion ban.
Powell City Councilman Troy Bray’s Facebook account commented Saturday under a lawmaker's re-post of a Wyoming Public Media story about the ruling, writing, “The only way Wyoming is going to have freedom is to start hanging bad judges.”
Multiple retired state judges and two retired Wyoming Supreme Court justices recoiled Tuesday from the comment, voicing shock, consternation or sadness.
“This man is obviously an idiot and does not deserve public office,” former Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Bill Hill, who is pro-life, said in a Tuesday phone interview.
Retired Albany County District Court Judge Jeffrey Donnell told Cowboy State Daily that Bray has “every right” to disagree with Forgey’s order.
But the comment was irresponsible at best, potentially dangerous at worst, and of the type that may inspire violence, Donnell added.
“I know of no more effective way to lose your freedom than to attack, or worse do away with, an independent judiciary,” said Donnell.
Retired Carbon County Judge Wade Waldrip said the comment makes him “very sad: that this is what our society has come to.
“Judge Forgey did not go looking for that dispute. It was randomly assigned to him … and he applied existing law to the facts as he understood them, and rendered the decision.”
Natrona County District Court Judge Dan Forgey, who issued the Friday injunction, is one of four judges seated in the Casper-based court, where the abortion challenge was filed.
Waldrip said Wyoming has the best judicial selection system in the nation, and he’s proud of its judges — and proud to have been one.
Retired Casper Circuit Court Judge Steve Brown condemned the comment as well, though in more political tones.
“To me this is evidence that the MAGA organization has decided that their power is more important than the rule of law,” said Brown in a Tuesday phone interview.
But those who prefer democracy “and the ability to choose your leadership” should consider the comment in error, “especially two days after a presidential assassination attempt shows how real this threat can be,” he said.
That was a reference to a gunman storming the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday and shooting into one Secret Service agent’s bulletproof vest before authorities subdued him.
More than 2,000 journalists attended the dinner, which is traditionally a recognition of the media’s role and the United States’ protection of it.
Since the landmark case of Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Wyoming state judges have blocked all four of the Legislature’s attempts to ban abortion, citing a section of the Wyoming Constitution that promises health care autonomy for competent adults.
Forgey blocked the “Human Heartbeat Act” temporarily while a pro-choice coalition challenges its constitutionality. He pointed to a Jan. 6 order by the Wyoming Supreme Court which had ruled that abortion is health care, and accessing to it is a right protected by the most rigorous standards in constitutional law.
The Mayor Says …
Powell Mayor John Wetzel, who serves alongside Bray, told Cowboy State Daily in a Tuesday email that he, Wetzel, stands “firmly on the side of law and order” in Wyoming and finds the comment from Bray’s Facebook account “completely out of line.”
“It seems hypocritical and dangerous to threaten human life following a judge’s decision on this topic,” wrote Wetzel. “However, as Mayor of Powell, I have no recourse over the action or commentary of sitting council members. That’s up to the voters.”
Bray declined Tuesday to comment.
Besides serving on the Powell City Council, he also served last week as a Park County GOP delegate to the state Republican Party.
In a committee tasked with reviewing and potentially revising the state party’s official platform, or core philosophy, Bray voiced favor toward a proposed measure to declare the U.S. a Christian nation, and Wyoming a Christian state.
That measure ultimately failed, when some delegates, also voicing Christian faith tenets, said Christians should be sharing their faith directly with people rather than phrasing it as a mass policy stance.
In 2021, Bray caught statewide attention after he sent a vulgar email to state Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, while he was serving as a Park County Republican Party precinct committeeman.
Bray criticized Nethercott for her role in defeating a bill that would have prohibited COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
“If I were as despicable a person as you, I would kill myself to rid the world of myself,” Bray wrote to Nethercott.
Then-Wyoming Senate President Dan Dockstader and House Speaker Eric Barlow issued a statement condemning Bray's letter at the time and urged the Wyoming and Park County Republican parties to demand his resignation as a committeeman.
The Legislature’s Forays
After the Wyoming Supreme Court’s Jan. 6 ruling proclaiming abortion health care, and access to it a fundamental right, some lawmakers tried to change the state Constitution so that the Legislature could restrict it.
Changing the constitutional provision on which the high court relied would have changed the legal framework of that issue.
But that didn’t work out.
Sen. Tim Salazar, R-Riverton, in February proposed a constitutional amendment change that didn’t reference abortion, but said the Wyoming Legislature could define “health care.”
Republican lawmakers who voted against the proposition told Cowboy State Daily they worried about other, non-abortion health care measures that future Legislatures could restrict, wrongly or excessively.
After Salazar’s measure failed, no other legislator filed a proposed constitutional change.
Lawmakers instead passed the Human Heartbeat Act.
It became law March 9 and remained in effect until Forgey’s order Friday banning abortions (except medical-emergency abortions) after the point at which a fetal heartbeat could be detected, about six weeks’ gestation.
The law says that if a judge blocks the heartbeat provision, a ban on abortions after the point of viability — about 24 weeks’ gestation — becomes law instead.
Chief Justice Says ...
Retired Wyoming Supreme Court Chief Justice Kate Fox, who was one of the justices joining the Jan. 6 majority opinion that abortion is a fundamental health care right, told Cowboy State Daily in a Tuesday email that the comment under Bray’s name reminds her that court officials are real people.
“I think of all of Wyoming’s judges and justices, court clerks, law clerks, judicial assistants, jurors, bailiffs, and sheriff’s deputies, who work every day to make sure that Wyoming citizens’ legal disputes are settled,” she wrote. “They have families, kids in school, they are human beings who get up in the morning, put their pants on one leg at a time, and go to work because they believe in the rule of law. To talk of hanging them makes my heart sick.”
Fox wrote that courts exist to resolve people’s disputes according to rules established by law.
“Whether everyone agrees with the outcome or not, it’s a process the people have agreed on and relied on, it is a critical piece of democracy,” she wrote, adding that many recent examples of violence have surfaced in the nation.
“And no matter our political affiliation, we must all reject it,” she wrote. “This kind of threat hurts all of us. Our judiciary has been especially concerned with increasing threats against judges and court personnel — if the judicial process isn’t safe, democracy is undermined.”
What To Do With Judges
Many on Wyoming’s political right have in recent years clashed with judges, both state and federal.
The tension mounted when Teton County District Court Judge Melissa Owens issued the first temporary injunction on an abortion ban in 2022.
U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl in 2025 dismissed a case in which a Rock Springs husband and wife claimed their school district had violated their parental rights by referring to their daughter with a male name and pronouns without telling them.
While the right to raise one’s children often curbs certain actions by officials, Skavdahl said he would not contour the right in a way that creates new duties.
The Wyoming Legislature had already answered that shortfall by creating the duty itself, in a 2024 law requiring school officials to notify parents of kids’ major health changes. But the new law didn’t apply in the Rock Springs parents’ case: their claims stemmed from 2022 and 2023.
Also in 2025, Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher issued a controversial decision ordering the Wyoming Legislature to reevaluate its school funding system.
Froelicher indicated that the state Constitution and courts’ interpretations of it require the state to furnish one computer for each student, school resource officers, elementary school-level mental health counselors, and more school lunch funding.
He called the state Constitution “a living thing, designed to meet the needs of progressive society.”
The Wyoming Supreme Court is now reviewing Froelicher’s ruling.
They Tried Some Stuff Though
Lawmakers proposed varying measures to change the judiciary in this year’s winter lawmaking session.
But since this is an even-numbered year, the Legislature’s session was roughly 20 days instead of 40, and was focused on passing a state governmental budget.
Those judicial reform measures failed.
In Wyoming, a judicial nominating committee comprised of lawyers and non-lawyers nominates three contenders to fill each vacancy on the bench of a state court.
The governor then appoints one of those nominees to become judge.
Rep. Mike Schmid, R-LaBarge, proposed switching to an elections system for judges. The House of Representatives did not consider that bill.
Sen. Brian Boner, R-Douglas, tried a lighter touch with a bill that would summon multiple judges to respond to constitutional challenges so one judge couldn’t “unilaterally” block a state law. His bill also would have barred retired judges and justices from being recalled on constitutional challenges to state laws.
With 18-13 approval the bill won a majority of introductory votes in the Senate, but it failed to garner the two-thirds approval non-budget bills need to enter either chamber during a budget session.
Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, R-Torrington, weathered a similar defeat when her bill to make prospective judges and justices survive state Senate confirmation before taking the bench won a 16-15 vote of approval.
Again, that’s short of two-thirds and her bill died.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
