About Amy

A Coloradan since 1998, Amy has nearly 30 years of experience as an attorney, more than half of which she has devoted to public service on behalf of people in our state. After a distinguished career in private practice at the law firm of Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell, where she handled criminal appeals on a pro bono basis, she decided to pursue a career in public service. She has worked at all three levels of government as a prosecutor — at the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and at two District Attorney’s Offices. 

As an Assistant Attorney General in the Consumer Protection Section, Amy Padden fought for the rights of Coloradans by prosecuting bogus charities and businesses engaged in fraud.

When Amy became an Assistant U.S. Attorney, she worked closely with law enforcement to protect our communities from terrorists and other dangerous inmates, including Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, who was seeking more lenient conditions of his sentence.

Less than four years after Amy joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she was promoted to a Deputy Chief position shortly after President Obama’s appointee, U.S. Attorney John Walsh, took office. She was then promoted by Acting U.S. Attorney Bob Troyer to serve as the Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney and Law Enforcement Coordinator for the District of Colorado. In that role, she was responsible for overseeing the administration and management of the office of nearly 200 prosecutors and staff working in three locations around the state. 

In addition to her day-to-day work at the Justice Department, Amy also played a key role in important criminal justice reform issues. She worked with other federal prosecutors across the country to end bias in prosecutions and served on a working group assembled at President Obama’s request to limit the number of inmates in, and improve the conditions of, restrictive housing. She was also the lead counsel who negotiated a groundbreaking settlement that provided federal inmates with the mental health care they need by fundamentally reforming the way in which mental health services were provided to dangerous inmates. The judge overseeing the case called the settlement a “singular achievement,” and Amy received the Department’s nationwide Attorney General’s Award for excellence for her work. 

In 2018, Amy returned to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to work in the Law Enforcement Unit, and ultimately in the Special Prosecutions Unit. As a state prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office, Amy assisted District Attorney’s Offices in rural areas by handling homicide and other felony cases.

After leaving the Attorney General’s Office, Amy worked as the Supervisory Prosecutor for a new diversion program she developed and as a Deputy District Attorney for the Fifth Judicial District, where she later worked as a felony prosecutor for nearly three years. She served as the District Attorney’s representative on the Recovery Court (a problem solving court for offenders with addiction issues) and as the Juvenile Prosecutor for Eagle and Lake Counties. Between her two tenures in the Fifth Judicial District, she served as a Deputy District Attorney for the Eleventh Judicial District, prosecuting felony cases.

Amy is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1991, and of the Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, DC, where she earned her law degree in 1994. Prior to moving to Colorado, Amy clerked on the D.C. Court of Appeals and for the late Judge Harold Greene on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Amy lives in Aurora with her husband, Bill Engleby, a real estate agent and small business owner. They have two grown daughters from Bill’s first marriage, Vanessa and Alex, and are grandparents to baby Kathryn. Vanessa is an elementary school teacher with Aurora Public Schools, and Alex works for an engineering company. When Amy is not hard at work, she enjoys hiking, skiing, running, and spending time with her dogs (a Bernese Mountain dog and a Golden Retriever) and with her granddaughter.