Near the end of a day cruising northeast Denver and Aurora while draining three 40-ounce bottles and a six-pack of beer, 16-year-old Dietrick Mitchell turned a corner.
Seconds later, the car he was driving slammed into 17-year-old Danny Goetsch as he walked in the gutter along East 13th Avenue with two friends strolling on the sidewalk and the grass.
Goetsch died.
Mitchell kept driving – didn’t slow, didn’t stop the car. He turned himself in two days later.
Shortly after the August 1991 incident, Arapahoe County prosecutors bypassed juvenile court and charged Mitchell as an adult. A jury found him guilty of murder with extreme indifference, and suddenly Mitchell, who insisted the hit-and-run was an accident, began serving a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
Prosecutors call it an appropriate prosecution of murder. Critics call it a prime example of how the adult system turns teens who could be rehabilitated into “throwaways.”
“Had they kept him in the juvenile system, he could have been treated for the alcoholism that caused the death,” says Carrie Thompson, one of the public defenders who initially handled Mitchell’s case. “But decisions were made that this kid was a throwaway, that he didn’t matter. To say that about a 16-year-old with alcohol problems is ridiculous. He was salvageable. But the minute you direct-file, you say he’s unsalvageable.”
Mitchell put a face on a controversial trend in Colorado that reaches back to the early 1990s: Lawmakers equipped prosecutors to put increasing numbers of teens on a path to prison while slashing juvenile programs geared toward rehabilitation.
Between 2001 and 2005, funding for state juvenile justice programs was cut by nearly $30 million, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice. Even a “middle ground” program for violent young offenders created within the Department of Corrections suffered.
To balance the enhanced prosecutorial powers, legislators in 1993 established the Youthful Offender System, a rehabilitation-centered program designed to give violent juveniles – short of those convicted of the most serious felonies – a last chance before locking them up in a penitentiary.
The court suspends their adult sentences and allows them to serve up to six years in a combination boot camp and campuslike environment at YOS. They attend counseling and classes – more than 90 percent have drug-abuse issues, and most have gang ties – followed by up to a year of intense community supervision.
If they fail the program, the adult prison sentence kicks in.
Plans called for nearly 500 beds in the Denver-based program to absorb the supposed influx of young criminals. It has used barely half that number, and, in the wake of a controversial move to Pueblo, a sex scandal and critical audits – plus nearly $1 million in cuts in services – YOS has shrunk in both size and stature.
But the program was born at the same time legislators handed prosecutors expanded powers to deal with violent juvenile offenders.
“This all goes back to the summer of 1993,” says Scott Storey, the district attorney for Jefferson and Gilpin counties. “That summer was fraught with serious juvenile violence, and the legislature felt that we needed to do something about that. So they passed the appropriate statutes, and we utilized those tools.”
“It was a brutal murder”
Mitchell went on trial just before public safety concerns reached a crescendo.
In June 1992, public perception of the Denver metro area’s gang problem approached high tide; the soon-to-be-christened Summer of Violence – and its legislative response – loomed ahead; and senseless killings by violent, colors-conscious youths had been making headlines for years.
Storey, then a Jefferson County deputy DA who tried Mitchell’s case because of conflicts in the Arapahoe County DA’s office, cast it as gang violence, claiming Mitchell had bragged afterward about killing a rival gang member. The victim, who was white, wore no gang colors and had no relationship with Mitchell, who is black. Even Goetsch’s mother didn’t believe her son’s death was gang-related.
Storey maintains that Mitchell’s motivation “had some gang inference” and disputes defense characterizations of the incident.
“It’s not just a drunk-driving accidental case; it was a brutal murder,” he says. “Sometimes I read accounts in the paper, and the inference is that it was a traffic accident. That’s not what it was.”
Mitchell’s trial attorney, William Jones Jr., counters that the prosecution’s effort to cast his client as a gang member unfairly played on public fears.
“What got him convicted was they threw that gang label on him, and, in ’91 or ’92, there was that whole hysteria,” says Jones, who now practices in Texas. “Die trick may have been hanging on the fringes, but with his maturity level and his toughness, he couldn’t be a gang member. He was really a kid.”
The jury deliberated for three hours. Almost all of that time was spent discussing an accompanying stolen-car charge, according to one juror, who requested anonymity for fear of gang repercussions. Jurors took a quick vote on the murder count to see where they stood and instantly realized they had a unanimous guilty verdict for first-degree murder with extreme indifference, the juror says.
It carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole.
“Bottom line,” says Storey, “the jury had a multitude of different theories to consider. And they found him guilty.”
Carrie Thompson and Carrie Clein had been Mitchell’s lawyers through the preliminary hearing and, among other strategies, had hired an accident-reconstruction expert to videotape the street to illustrate visibility issues.
But shortly before trial, Mitchell’s mother fired the public defenders and hired Jones.
“The whole case, it was like a case against an ill-prepared defense,” says the juror. “If they could have come up with something that made sense, I guess they would have.”
Linda Mitchell, Dietrick’s aunt, recounts that her nephew was born in Louisiana to a high school senior who had – and continues to have – drug-abuse issues of her own. At 12, Mitchell was “going to school smelling like beer,” was admitted to a drug treatment center and was put on a drug to discourage drinking, his aunt says.
Years later, his high school classmates nicknamed him “Wino.”
After the family moved to Denver, his mother moved in and out of his life while Mitchell struggled to manage his anger and continually got into trouble, his aunt says.
Mitchell’s presentence report noted that he “appears to be a product of his environment.”
Although the legislature stiffened Colorado sentencing laws in 1990 to include automatic life without parole, an unrelated appeals court decision since then has changed Mitchell’s sentence to life with the possibility of parole after 40 years. His eligibility date arrives in 2031.
Racial overtones
Disappointed that she never got to try Mitchell’s case, public defender Thompson remains outraged by a pursuit of first-degree murder charges she claims carried racial overtones in overwhelmingly white Arapahoe County and pandered to growing public fear of gangs.
“At the time,” she says, “it was a political notch, coming down hard on kids. It wasn’t a gang killing. They had to know that, and to make it a gang killing was despicable.”
Violence, media coverage and politics converged about a year later.
Paul Colomy, a sociology professor at the University of Denver, studied the Summer of Violence and the special legislation it spawned – including YOS and increased direct-file powers, in which prosecutors can bypass the juvenile justice system to charge teens as adults. But he noted that the Denver metro crime statistics didn’t support the media’s, or politicians’, portrayal of a spectacular spike in violent youth crime.
Although statewide juvenile arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter peaked at 37 in 1993, arrests for all violent crimes by juveniles dropped slightly from the previous year. In any event, Colomy points out that those statistics weren’t available until well after the special legislative session, which was driven by the well-publicized metro-area incidents.
“The crime rates didn’t play a prominent role in the discourse,” Colomy says. “It wasn’t on anyone’s plate. What happened was exceptional cases, atypical cases, which is why they were newsworthy.”
His research counted seven highly publicized, violent incidents that defined Denver’s Summer of Violence. Only one of them undoubtedly involved a juvenile perpetrator.
Although the juvenile justice system had problems, Colomy points out, the early estimate of YOS beds – far more than ever were used – illustrates the exaggerated nature of the juvenile crime threat. And claims by prosecutors that the subsequent plunge in juvenile crime rates reflected the effectiveness of the judicial crackdown don’t hold water, he says.
“Some would say that, in retrospect, who cares how the sausage got made, given what happened to juvenile crime rates,” Colomy says. “But they went down everywhere, especially homicides, even in places where there was no direct(-file).”
As Colorado prosecutors gained more power and shifted more young offenders into the prison system, state officials slashed the number of juvenile rehabilitation programs – both in the Department of Corrections and in the juvenile justice system, which still incarcerates the majority of youth offenders.
Since 2001, Colorado officials have cut $27.7 million from juvenile rehabilitative services such as mental-health treatment, educational programs and diversion.
“We used to have the philosophy that we use our systems to rehabilitate, not incapacitate,” says Maureen Cain, a defense attorney who has represented juveniles. “Now it’s so much tougher to give a chance to these kids.”
The YOS offers one option – one that some reform advocates say should be used more often. Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, envisions YOS becoming Colorado’s version of a successful Texas program at the Giddings State School, which treats violent offenders.
“More of these kids should be going to YOS instead of serving life,” Hefley says.
According to a 2004 evaluation by the state Division of Criminal Justice, 161 of 892 YOS residents in the program’s history had blown their last chance – an 18 percent revocation rate for misbehavior in the program.
The report also highlighted significant problems: the loss of 18 staff positions, lack of individualized treatment and inconsistent sanctions. Among its recommendations: investigate allegations of abuse, renew efforts to hire and promote committed staff, and help more residents complete high school.
But YOS, at least as a well- funded, serious tool of rehabilitation, may be a diminishing option.
It began with high hopes and buy-in from law enforcement, district attorneys and judges, and it maintains perhaps its strongest selling point: a 19 percent recidivism rate that’s less than half that of the Department of Corrections’ adult facilities. Juveniles who completed their secondary education while in YOS were more than three times as likely to remain arrest- free upon release.
But in recent years, the last- ditch hope for violent or chronic juvenile offenders has foundered.
A cadre of energetic staff opened the program at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center to mostly positive reviews before the DOC moved it in 1998 to a more spacious Pueblo campus, where problems quickly emerged and multiplied.
Massive staff turnover forced a shift toward traditional incarceration standards from the original treatment-and-education emphasis. Budget cuts, reduced services and the lingering black eye of a sex-assault scandal involving staff and female residents have continued to foster the image of a program that has strayed from its mission.
Many familiar with the YOS, including some who launched it, contend that the changes have diminished the program and raised questions about its future.
“Really, the enthusiasm is gone,” says Harlan Bockman, chief district court judge in Adams County and one of the program’s early advocates. “I think it’s just faded as an option. It’s just one of those other programs that exists, but nobody talks about it.
“Nobody’s selling it.”
“A sound investment”
Statistics compiled by the DOC and the Department of Criminal Justice reveal a mixed bag in terms of shrinking admissions but, more recently, a higher proportion of direct-file convictions sentenced to YOS.
After the program opened with a class of 24, admissions averaged right at 100 per year from fiscal 1995 through 2000. Since then, they’ve averaged nearly 74 per year. From January 2003 through January 2006, YOS saw an 18 percent decline to 171 beds filled at a facility built to accommodate 500.
“I think the DAs don’t have a lot of confidence in the program, given what’s occurred,” defense attorney Jeff Matthews says of the cuts, scandal and other changes at YOS. “They’re reluctant to go with it. That also ties in with the idea that once a decision is made to direct-file, they don’t concern themselves with YOS, because they think a case is more appropriate for prison.”
Adams County DA Don Quick couldn’t disagree more. In fiscal 2004, his office – where he previously worked as juvenile chief – accounted for more than one-fifth of YOS admissions.
“All direct-files have to be run past me,” Quick says. “No juvenile gets filed on as an adult until I receive sufficient information on what he did, what record we have on him and what we want done. And YOS is part of that discussion.”
Quick points out that he has the advantage of an experienced group of juvenile prosecutors and “institutional knowledge” about the program. And he points to YOS as a complementary tool to direct-file’s prosecutorial hammer.
“I wouldn’t want to be a prosecutor in a state with direct-file that doesn’t have YOS as an option,” Quick says. “There are kids that do crimes that they should have a record for, but they shouldn’t be warehoused in DOC. I want the majority of direct-files to end up in YOS – the overwhelming majority.”
Since 1998, about one-fourth of direct-file convictions resulted in YOS sentences. But a more recent statistical snapshot shows a sentencing trend away from prison toward YOS.
From 2001 to 2004, the percentage of juveniles tried in adult court and sentenced to prison dropped from 36 percent to 19 percent. Over that same period, direct-file convictions yielding YOS sentences rose from 18 percent to 46 percent, according to a report published by the state Division of Criminal Justice.
The increased percentage of juveniles being sent to YOS may simply reflect prosecutors direct filing charges more frequently for lesser crimes, says Richard Swanson, the architect and former deputy director of YOS who now teaches psychology at Metropolitan State College of Denver.
“It sounds to me that there may have been an increase of taking people into adult court that otherwise would be handled in traditional juvenile court,” he says.
DOC statistics show that while only three juveniles with more-serious Class 2 felonies have been admitted to YOS over those five years, the percentage of young offenders convicted of the two least serious felony classes has more than doubled.
The program doesn’t come cheap.
The current per-day price tag of $185 per resident dwarfs the $72-per-day cost for housing DOC prison inmates.
“There’s hope for some of these offenders to turn their lives around,” says warden Cherrie Greco. “It’s costly on the front end, but when you look at the long term, it’s a sound investment.”
The cost will drop to $124 per day once YOS swaps facilities with the nearby Pueblo Minimum Center, which houses an expanding population of female inmates. But some critics contend that downsizing the physical facility of YOS, while promoting cost efficiency and perhaps saving the program for the short term, represents the beginning of the end.
Some familiar with the program – including some who helped found it – wonder if it will survive, especially in a time of budget cuts and the program’s planned move this summer.
Regis Groff, the program’s first director, has watched with disappointment as YOS evolved into something far – in both distance and philosophy – from the original.
“I’m sure it’ll just disappear,” he says. “And it’s too bad. It’ll never be what it was initially unless the staff is committed to YOS and has the backing of the department. I’m not sure either of those exists. Because it’s so different, it has to be sold over and over again.”
Growing up in prison
Dietrick Mitchell’s case unfolded a year before YOS came into existence. But Thompson, the public defender, says Mitchell would have been a prime candidate for such a program if race, politics and prosecutors’ direct-file powers hadn’t put an alcoholic teen away for life.
“He could deal with discipline, alcohol – all the issues that go into forming a responsible, healthy adult,” says Thompson. “He would have been perfect for that program.”
Mitchell, now 31, says in a letter that he has matured and taken a more positive path. He has studied philosophy, written poetry, recorded a CD and studied real estate investing, marketing and advertising.
“Prison has been my university where I have grown up,” he writes. “But a lot of kids do not come into this type of growth during their incarceration because of the doctrines taught by older convicts. When you come into the system as a kid, you cannot stand on your own two feet without guidance because it’s a new experience and it takes more than knowing how to fight physically.
“Prison is a mental state, and if you are alone, your chances of making it are none.”
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-820-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Miles Moffeit can be reached at 303-820-1415 or mmoffeit@denverpost.com.
