I observed a session of Denver Juvenile Court at 520 West Colfax Avenue, Courtroom 2A, with Magistrate Melanie Gilbert. The docket included cases of juvenile delinquency, truancy, and child protection. What struck me most was the remarkable fairness and compassion with which Magistrate Gilbert ruled. She seemed to genuinely care about the adolescents before her and acted like an amalgam of a magistrate, therapist, and concerned mother. “I’m proud of you for maintaining your sobriety,” she told one boy. “Do you feel that we have not provided you with the best treatment for your drug use?” she asked the boy’s sister, a girl around fourteen who had failed a recent urine analysis. “What can we do to help you stop?” she asked the girl. Later in the afternoon, Gilbert said to a boy whom she had just ordered to spend a month at a detention center. “Daniel, it’s going to be okay, all right?”
One of the more interesting cases involved a father and his three adolescent children. Gilbert asked the children how things had gone since their last court date. They mumbled, “Okay,” “Good,” All right.” A representative from Denver Public Schools told Gilbert that the children were still frequently absent from school. Another government employee (I did not catch exactly where he worked) then stood up and told Gilbert that one of the children had not been showing up for his urine analyses. The City of Denver attorney then told Gilbert that the children’s father had recently shown up to the children’s school intoxicated. The attorney said that the children were not “engaging with professionals in a meaningful way,” and he recommended that the children be removed from the home. The children’s guardian ad litem told Gilbert that the father had not completed any of the urine analyses which Gilbert had previously ordered him to start taking.
The father tried to excuse his non-compliance with Gilbert’s order by saying that he had been working seven days a week and would be fired if he left work to take these tests. Gilbert and the father went back and forth awhile, with the father making one excuse after another. Gilbert seemed to catch the father in a couple lies, and at one point she told him, “I do not expect the people in this program to be perfect, but I do expect them to be honest.” When the father asked for another chance, Gilbert said she had given him many previous chances and did not believe the children would be safe in his home until he could prove to the court that he was clean. When the father asked when he could have his children back, Gilbert responded, “I don’t know. That’s up to you.”
This last case involved issues of juvenile delinquency, truancy, and child protection. The children’s use of marijuana is illegal (Colo. Const. art. XVIII, §16, cl. a), as is their alcohol consumption (C.R.S. §18-13-122). Colorado law—C.R.S. §19-2-302(4)(d)—allows Gilbert to mandate the children to undergo regular drug testing. Regarding the children’s truancy, C.R.S. §22-33-104 states that secondary school children in Colorado must attend at least 1,056 hours of school every year unless they meet such criteria as being “temporarily ill or injured” (2a) and having a “physical, mental, or emotional disability” (2c). Regarding child protection, because of the father’s evident substance abuse—Gilbert made it clear that the court must interpret the father’s failure to take the urine analyses as an admission that he is using—Gilbert had to assume that the children were being neglected. I believe that Gilbert’s ruling here was based on C.R.S. §19-3-102(1)(a)-(c). My guess is that case law has established that parents who are abusing substances are failing to provide “proper parental care” and are possibly allowing their home environments to become “injurious” to their children’s welfare. C.R.S. §19-3-604 states that parental rights may be terminated if parents engages in “[e]xcessive use of intoxicating liquors or controlled substances...which affects the ability to care and provide for the child.” C.R.S. §19-2-113(2)(b)(vii) authorizes Gilbert to mandate the father to conduct urine analyses and also to participate in a drug treatment program.
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