On Monday night, the Denver City Council begins deliberations on a recommendation that the long-awaited Denver Justice Center Courthouse be named the Lindsey-Flannigan Courthouse.
It would be a well-deserved honor.
James C. Flannigan (1916-2008) was the first African-American to serve as a Denver district court judge, and is a bit better known than Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey (1869-1943), a forgotten hero in Colorado.
Lindsey was probably the second most famous and admired Coloradan (after Buffalo Bill) during his lifetime. Best known for establishing Denver’s stand-alone juvenile court, he argued that children should not be imprisoned, often for petty offenses, with adult criminals. This, he argued, transformed jails into crime schools and child-abuse hells.
Lindsey championed separate juvenile jails with an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment. He also pushed many other progressive reforms, ranging from race relations to women’s suffrage to Colorado’s pace-setting “Lindsey Laws.” These Colorado statutes established still-standing reforms, such as aid for dependent children.
To help unwed mothers who produced many of the troubled youth he worried about, the judge even performed marriage ceremonies with fictitious husbands and then annulled the marriage, redeeming the young mother’s reputation.
Lindsey also pushed for the construction of Denver playgrounds, mountain summer camps for city-confined minorities and orphans, and a Juvenile Athletic Organization to steer youngsters into sports.
Lindsey’s many detractors grew livid when he supported coal miners after the 1914 labor strife in the Ludlow coal fields near Walsenburg. In the 1920s, Lindsey added the politically potent Ku Klux Klan to his enemy list. He also offended many of his Catholic supporters by advocating no-fault divorce and birth control in his 1927 book, “The Companionate Marriage,” co-authored with Wainwright Evans.
Lindsey exposed a Colorado political system whose corruption became most obvious in 1904, when the legislature and state Supreme Court overturned the popular vote. Lindsey, one of the nation’s best- known muckrakers, exposed corporate corruption and attacked the Colorado Supreme Court as its defender. A bitter Supreme Court eventually found a way to disbar Lindsey on trumped-up charges.
Lindsey moved to Los Angeles, where he was elected to that city’s superior court and asked to continue his crusade with Hollywood movies.
In 1935, the Colorado Supreme Court reinstated Lindsey. Yet to this day, Lindsey remains largely forgotten. Naming the new courthouse for him, as former Juvenile Court Judge Ted Rubin has pointed out, is a matter of delayed justice.
After Lindsey’s death in 1943, his widow, Henrietta, sprinkled some of his ashes near 16th Street and Court Place on the site of the courthouse (now the Sheraton Hotel) where he had dispensed justice for more than a quarter-century.
One of Lindsey’s staunchest supporters was Molly Brown, who, like Lindsey, defied social conventions. She held fund-raisers for Lindsey and his Juvenile Court System at her Denver home. The Rocky Mountain News, under its reform- minded publisher and former U.S. Sen. Thomas Patterson, generally sided with Lindsey. The Denver Post attacked Lindsey and his book, “The Beast,” in a Sept. 20, 1909, editorial as a man with a “withered soul” who subjected Denver to “the scorn of the world.”
Although Lindsey was overly strident and criticized many prominent Coloradans (including Walter Scott Cheesman, David Moffat, Mayor Robert Speer and Gov. Henry Buchtel), recognition is overdue for a man who made Denver a landmark in the international annals of justice.
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