A 72-year-old clerk was cornered behind her register by a man holding two hunting knives. She put her hands up to keep him back, and was fired. The Colorado Supreme Court has now held that if an employee is fired for lawfully defending herself, she has a claim — a question Colorado law had never answered.
Colorado’s at-will employment rule is famously blunt: absent a contract, an employer may fire you for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. There are narrow exceptions where firing someone would violate public policy — for refusing to break the law, for performing a public duty, for exercising an important job-related right.
On June 15, 2026, in Moreno v. Circle K Stores, Inc., the Colorado Supreme Court added one: self-defense.
Mary Ann Moreno has not won her case. The federal court handling her lawsuit stopped and asked the Colorado Supreme Court a single question of law: does such a claim exist at all? The answer was yes, and the case went back down. She still has to prove she was actually defending herself and that Circle K fired her for that — and Circle K contests both, arguing she was trying to stop a shoplifter.
So the win is a cause of action, not a vindication. Before this decision, a Colorado employer could fire you for defending yourself and you had no claim whatsoever; nobody knew otherwise, which is why the question got certified. Now the claim exists. That is the entire holding — and the alternative was a published ruling that a company policy can strip you of self-defense as a condition of keeping your job.
Note also what she did and didn’t do: she was unarmed. She extended her arms to keep a man with two knives from closing on her. That counts as “physical force” under § 18-1-704, which requires no weapon — but this case says nothing at all about carrying one at work. See the limits below.
“It makes no sense to suggest that everyone has an inalienable right to defend themselves if faced with imminent danger, unless they are at work. Rather, the right follows the employee from home to work and back and everywhere in between.”
Justice Berkenkotter, for the Court. Moreno v. Circle K Stores, Inc., 2026 CO 46, ¶ 53.
The Court took the facts from the complaint and the federal court below, and was careful to say its answer did not depend on whose version is right. Here is what the opinion recounts.
Mary Ann Moreno, seventy-two years old, was working an evening shift. Tyler Wimmer came to the register carrying several items, including two hunting knives, and set the knives on the U-shaped counter between them.
He asked for cigarettes. She got them from the case behind her. As she began ringing them up, he said, in the opinion’s words, something to the effect of “just give them to me for free.” She refused.
Wimmer then picked the knives back up and started around the counter. Moreno told him twice, “don’t come back here.” He kept coming. When he was within reach, she extended her arms — instinctively, she says, to keep him away from her.
He grabbed a pack of cigarettes, walked out, and was arrested for armed robbery.
Circle K fired her for violating its “Don’t Chase or Confront” policy, which instructs employees not to “confront[,] follow, pursue, track, chase, fight[,] or follow” a customer suspected of shoplifting.
Under Martin Marietta Corp. v. Lorenz (1992), a public-policy exception requires a right that is clearly expressed, sufficiently public, and granted to workers. Self-defense cleared all three.
“The employment relationship should not be used to strip workers of the ordinary legal privileges every person possesses. The right to self-defense has never been cabined by role or location.” ¶ 53
“It is a unique, essential, and inalienable right that exists for workers, students, retirees, and the unemployed alike. It allows people to protect themselves in their homes, schools, houses of worship, and workplaces under very specifically defined circumstances.” ¶ 53
“It is not a right that is left at the door when a person enters the workplace.” ¶ 54
“For these reasons, we answer the certified question by concluding that yes, both section 704 and article II, section 3 can serve as the basis for a claim of wrongful termination contrary to public policy. To hold otherwise would fatally undermine that right.” ¶ 61
Note what the Court leaned on. Not just the criminal statute, but Article II, Section 3 of the Colorado Constitution, which lists among the “natural, essential and inalienable” rights of all persons “the right of enjoying and defending their lives.” The Court read that word as doing real work.
“Today the majority establishes a new public-policy exception to the at-will employment doctrine… In doing so, the majority misapplies (and effectively rewrites) our test…” ¶ 62
“This protection against criminal liability solely benefits the individual; it does not impact the public at large.” ¶ 89
“after today, a private employer may no longer terminate an employee who violates a ‘Don’t Chase or Confront Policy’ like Circle K’s… The consequence, I fear, will be workplaces that are less safe.” ¶ 98
The dissent’s core objection is that an inalienable right held by everyone is still a personal right, and that treating it as “public” swallows the exception whole. Read it — it is the strongest argument against the result, and it is worth understanding.
If you heard that Colorado is considering a duty-to-retreat law, this case is the most likely thing you heard about — and it is not a law.
The phrase appears exactly once in the entire opinion, in the dissent’s list of questions the majority left unanswered:
“Does it include a ‘no duty to retreat’ doctrine like that
recognized in our case law? See People v. Toler, 9 P.3d 341, 348 (Colo. 2000).
Presumably so.”
— Márquez, C.J., dissenting, ¶ 96
That is the Chief Justice, in dissent, observing that the majority’s new exception presumably carries Colorado’s no-duty-to-retreat rule with it into the workplace. It is the opposite of a proposal to impose one.
We searched the Colorado General Assembly’s records for the 2025 regular session, the 2025 extraordinary session, and the 2026 regular session. The word “retreat” returns zero results in the bill index across every session from 2016 through 2026, and it appears zero times in the full text of all 206 bills in the Crimes, Civil Law, and Courts subject categories for 2025–2026. The 2025 and 2026 Digests of Bills show no hits for “retreat,” “18-1-704,” or “self-defense.” No Colorado bill has proposed a duty to retreat. The 2027 session convenes January 11, 2027; nothing is visible before then. See the limits of that search in the note at the bottom of this page.
Since this is the underlying question, here is the actual rule. In People v. Toler, 9 P.3d 341 (Colo. 2000), the Colorado Supreme Court held:
“a person does not have to ‘retreat to the wall’ before using deadly force to defend himself, unless the person was the ‘initial aggressor’ in the encounter, even if he was in a place he had no right to be.”
The rule is not floating common law. It comes out of the structure of the statute: § 18-1-704(3) lists the categories of people who cannot claim self-defense — provokers, initial aggressors, participants in combat by agreement — and only initial aggressors are burdened with withdrawing first. The legislature said as much in its own 1971 drafting comment, quoted in Toler: the statute “omits the doctrine of ‘retreat to the wall’ which has never been the law in Colorado.”
So Colorado is a state with no duty to retreat by statutory implication and settled case law, rather than a codified “stand your ground” statute — plus a separate castle-doctrine statute, § 18-1-704.5, that grants an occupant of a dwelling both criminal and civil immunity against an unlawful intruder. That immunity is stronger than most states’ stand-your-ground laws, and narrower: it covers the dwelling, not a business, a vehicle, or the street.
The Court was unusually explicit about how narrow its answer is. Do not let anyone tell you this case means more than it does.
Most of this site is about a right being narrowed — by a tax, by a card, by a waiting period, by a number on a magazine. This is the rarer thing: a Colorado court refusing to let a right be narrowed by a private policy and a paycheck.
The principle the majority reached for is one this site has argued from the beginning. A right that evaporates whenever exercising it is inconvenient to someone with power over you is not a right; it is a permission. The Court put it in terms of geography — the right “follows the employee from home to work and back and everywhere in between” — but the logic is the same one that applies to every other place a Coloradan is told the right must yield.
An inalienable right that stops at the door of your workplace
was never inalienable to begin with.
And note the coda: Chief Justice Márquez, dissenting, took it as given that Colorado’s no-duty-to-retreat rule would come along with the new exception. Even the Justices who thought the majority went too far did not question that.
Colorado’s courts got this one right. The statutes on the rest of this site are a harder fight, and they are all live at once.
The author of this site is not an attorney and does not practice law. Nothing published here is legal advice, no part of it is offered as legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship with anyone. This is Second Amendment advocacy and general-interest commentary written by a private citizen, and it includes opinion. Nothing here is employment advice either — if you have been fired, talk to a Colorado employment lawyer, and note that wrongful-termination claims carry filing deadlines.
Full terms: Legal Notice & Terms of Use → Page last reviewed August 30, 2026. The law may have changed since.