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SPECIAL DENVER POST--Jessica Gonzales in front of the Supreme Court, Friday, March 18, 2005 in Washington. Gonzales has a case involving a restraining order on a former husband who kidnapped and murdered her three children and then died in a shoot-out.
SPECIAL DENVER POST–Jessica Gonzales in front of the Supreme Court, Friday, March 18, 2005 in Washington. Gonzales has a case involving a restraining order on a former husband who kidnapped and murdered her three children and then died in a shoot-out.
DENVER, CO - SEPTEMBER  8:    Denver Post reporter Joey Bunch on Monday, September 8, 2014. (Denver Post Photo by Cyrus McCrimmon)
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CASTLE ROCK — The case of a former Castle Rock woman whose three children were murdered by her estranged husband has been sent to a human-rights organization to determine whether the woman is a victim of human-rights abuses by U.S. police and courts.

Jessica Gonzales, who has remarried and uses the name Lenahan, wanted to sue Castle Rock police, claiming they failed to enforce a restraining order against Simon Gonzales before he killed their three young daughters in 1999.

She made numerous phone calls to police the night of the murders. Police said they never found Simon Gonzales. Later he arrived at the police station with his daughters dead in his truck, opened fire on the building and was killed by police.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court denied Lenahan the right to sue for $30 million, saying she couldn’t sue police for failing to prevent a crime. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a request for an opinion with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the diplomatic Organization of American States.

“The state and Castle Rock police violated her human rights by failing to answer her request for help,” said Araceli Martinez-Olguín, an ACLU attorney in the case. “The U.S. Supreme Court violated her human rights by saying she had no constitutionally protected right to have her protective order enforced.”

Neither Lenahan nor Castle Rock Police Chief Tony Lane could be reached for comment.

The Castle Rock case becomes one of more than 1,400 pending before the seven-member international panel, which meets to deliberate for two weeks each year, said Maria-Isabel Rivero, spokeswoman for the commission.

The panel has 47 U.S. cases pending, most of which were filed by the ACLU.

The organization has no authority to legally challenge the Supreme Court’s decision, and it disagrees with the high court “very often,” Rivero said. The human-rights panel has no timetable to consider the Castle Rock petition.

The case could yield the first U.S. ruling on domestic violence.

A declaration by an international group citing police and court failures on domestic violence issues as a human-rights violation would make a bold statement, advocates said.

“That’s very powerful,” said Randy Saucedo, a Denver domestic-violence consultant to advocacy groups and courts.

“That’s the end game: for an international body to say Ms. Gonzales had a human right to be protected against domestic violence.

“If the city of Castle Rock states that it did everything it could, then this court could say very clearly that it didn’t.”

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