DENVER—Judges would be able to review prosecutors’ decisions to charge juveniles as adults under a bill backed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
District attorneys strongly oppose the measure (House Bill 1208) and the panel agreed to undo one change in the system backed by the House with an eye toward getting support from Gov. Bill Ritter, the former district attorney for Denver. Unlike the House version, the Senate version would still allow district attorneys to charge 14 and 15 year olds as adults.
Under the bill, district attorneys could still file adult charges against juveniles age 14 and up in district court but defense lawyers could request a hearing to review the decision. The defense would have the burden of convincing a judge that that case would be better handled in the juvenile system.
Shaffer said that the current system works about 95 percent of the time but there should be a way to appeal possible abuses.
“This is not intended to be a frontal attack on the district attorneys in our state,” he said.
The bill would also require that teens charged as adults be housed in juvenile detention facilities as they await trial rather than in a segregated section of jails that also house adults.
The bill will be reviewed next by the appropriations committee.
Ritter, who helped push for the current system as a prosecutor, has not taken a public position on the bill.
Under a law passed after a summer of gang violence in 1993, prosecutors have been able to decide whether to “direct file” adult charges against juveniles for a range of felonies, mostly violent offenses. The change followed complaints that some juvenile court judges consistently refused to transfer cases to adult court.
District attorneys say they rarely use their direct filing power and that the transfer hearings would last several days and bog down the system.
Scott Storey, the district attorney in Jefferson and Gilpin counties, said last year his office handled 1,679 juvenile cases. Of those, 728 involved teens that could have been charged as adults but he said only eight were. He said the governor’s new juvenile clemency board might be a better way to address abuses rather than revamping the system at the front end.
However, teens who have been charged as adults as well as their parents and lawyers urged lawmakers to allow a judge to step in and weed out possible abuses by overzealous prosecutors.
Brittney Graham was charged as an adult at 14 in Weld County after she and a friend stole her father’s gun to try and used it to try to rob someone before running away. She pleaded guilty and served four years in the Youthful Offender System, a separate prison the state created for violent teen felons when the direct file law was expanded in 1993.
Her father, Bill Graham, a sheriff’s corrections deputy, said he was never contacted about the decision to prosecute his daughter as an adult even though he was a victim and neither was the person the girls tried to rob. He said that kind of power should be in the hands of a judge.
Brittney Graham, who plans to start college in August, said the change would be worth it even if it just overturns 10 or 15 bad decisions a year.
“I think those few are the ones that matter,” she said.
Bill Graham places most of the blame on an assistant district attorney who has since left the office. A message left after business hours for the district attorney’s office wasn’t immediately returned.
The bill is also opposed by the state’s sheriffs, Attorney General John Suthers and the Department of Corrections, which runs the Youthful Offender System. The facility in Pueblo has its own high school and offers substance abuse and mental health counseling.
