The 14-year-old boy charged with killing a Denver bar bouncer last month was repeatedly released from custody in a preceding juvenile case over the objection of prosecutors who thought he posed a danger to the community, according to court records obtained by The Denver Post.

The teenager was also wanted on a warrant at the time of the killing that would have kept him temporarily jailed without bond had he been arrested, records show.

The teen, whom The Post is not naming because he is a juvenile, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of 49-year-old William “Todd” Kidd on July 10 outside the Federales Denver bar at 29th and Larimer streets in Denver’s River North Arts District.

Kidd, who worked at the bar, was intervening in a disturbance when he was shot, police have said. He died two days later on July 12.

The teenager’s journey through Colorado’s juvenile courts highlights how the system is designed to keep children out of custody through a focus on pretrial release and a statutory cap on the number of kids who can be incarcerated in the state — an approach supporters hail as the best way to help vulnerable youths, but critics decry as soft on crime.

“The vast majority of kids going through the system are not safety risks to anybody,” said Emma Mclean-Riggs, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “Sometimes these cases are used as leverage to produce more incarceration of children when there is not sufficient context.”

George Brauchler, a former district attorney and current Republican candidate for district attorney in the 23rd Judicial District, said while he understands the juvenile justice system’s aim to keep kids out of detention, the approach can be detrimental to both youths and broader community safety.

“We have gone so far off the deep end of the criminal justice reform spectrum that we are rolling the dice for a lot of communities because it makes us feel good about how we are treating kids,” he said.

Charged with stealing cars

The 14-year-old boy was arrested on charges of stealing cars in Douglas County in December and again in Adams County in January, court records show.

In Douglas County, he was charged in juvenile court with motor vehicle theft, conspiracy to commit motor vehicle theft, criminal mischief and false reporting, said Eric Ross, a spokesman for the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. He declined to comment further.

In Adams County, the 14-year-old was charged in juvenile court with motor vehicle theft, resisting arrest, vehicular eluding and obstructing a police officer. Chris Hopper, spokesman for the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the case.

In the Adams County case, the boy on multiple occasions violated the conditions of his personal recognizance bond, records obtained by The Post show. He sometimes missed required meetings, violated his GPS monitoring and struggled to keep his GPS unit charged.

Personal recognizance bonds allow defendants to be released from custody on the promise they will return to court, rather than requiring defendants to pay money as collateral before their release. In 2021, state lawmakers required that all bonds set in juvenile cases be personal recognizance bonds.

“There was kind of a universal understanding that holding kids because their families are poor doesn’t make any sense,” Mclean-Riggs said of the 2021 change.

In late April, Adams County prosecutors filed a motion to revoke the boy’s bond after a fifth bond violation report was filed in the case, the records show.

The teen was arrested, and during a court hearing on May 1, his attorneys asked that he be released on bond into his mother’s custody. Prosecutors objected, citing “community safety concerns” because of his GPS violations, the records show.

Magistrate Michal Lord-Blegen granted a personal recognizance bond with several conditions, including that the teenager remain on GPS monitoring, attend school and therapy, and stay away from weapons, drugs and alcohol.

Just over two weeks later, another bond violation report — the seventh overall — was filed in the case, records show. Prosecutors once again sought to revoke the boy’s bond, and the boy was arrested again.

On May 17, Lord-Blegen again allowed the teenager to be released from custody, again over the objection of prosecutors who sought for the boy to be held with no bond.

On May 28, the 14-year-old ran away from home on his way to court, according to the records. Two days later, Lord-Blegen issued a warrant for his arrest and ordered the boy be detained on a no-bond hold when he was taken into custody.

But the teenager was not arrested again until July 16 — days after Denver police allege he shot and killed Kidd. Officers found the boy in Casper, Wyoming, police have said.

The records obtained by the Post do not specifically indicate why the magistrate issued the personal recognizance bonds, but do note that the teenager had been attending therapy, was referred to a mentor and, until the homicide, was not arrested on new charges, only on bond violations. Lord-Blegen could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The 14-year-old boy appeared in juvenile court Tuesday for a hearing in the Denver homicide case, but a judge closed the courtroom to the public after learning that members of the media were in attendance.

A focus on rehabilitation

Juvenile court operates differently than adult court and is designed to focus on rehabilitation and the child’s best interests, rather than punitive measures, attorneys told The Post. All of the attorneys who spoke with The Post were not familiar with the teenager’s case and spoke generally about juvenile justice.

Judges can hold a child in detention without a bond if they find the child poses a substantial risk of harm to others and community-based alternatives to incarceration will not work, state law says.

But the presumption in juvenile court is that the young defendants should be released from custody whenever possible, because childhood incarceration has been proven so harmful to youths, Mclean-Riggs said.

In cases involving property crime — like motor vehicle theft — and not violent crime, youths typically will be released on bond while their cases are pending, said Tally Zuckerman, a Denver criminal defense attorney.

“I would honestly be shocked if a kid was held on a no-bond hold for a motor vehicle theft,” she said.

Children are also given extra leeway for bond violations, she added, particularly for violations like missing school or returning a positive drug test that don’t involve violence or new crimes.

Technical violations of bond often are not a good indicator of a person’s level of threat to a community, said Tristan Gorman, policy director for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.

“That happens a lot with people who are poor, people who don’t have transportation, people with mental health issues or any number of things,” she said. “But it also happens a lot with teenagers who don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe. So… if it is mostly about GPS and check-ins, that is not really indicative of, is this kid safe in the community?”

Brauchler said the leeway given to youths in juvenile court has in some cases swung too far toward rehabilitation and away from accountability.

“I want us to be rehabilitation-focused where appropriate, and that applies to 98, 99% of juvenile cases,” he said. “But the rest of them, we have to have the tools in the toolbox to treat them more seriously.”

Juvenile bed cap

Colorado lawmakers have passed a series of laws over the last two decades aimed at limiting the number of juveniles held in the state’s juvenile detention centers, citing the long-term harm of childhood incarceration.

Legislators first set a cap on the number of youths who could be detained statewide in 2003, limiting the number of available beds for juvenile detention to 479. That cap has been steadily lowered — most recently in 2021 to 215 beds. Lawmakers also allowed for an additional 22 temporary emergency beds that become available if the state hits its juvenile detention limit.

The bed cap has drawn ire in recent years as the state has neared the limit, with some prosecutors, law enforcement officers and politicians saying the ceiling pushes children who should be detained back into the community.

“From a pure logical standpoint, it makes no sense,” Brauchler said. “It takes a fixed number — not a percentage of juveniles in the state, not a percentage of juveniles in the system, not a percentage of crime, not a percentage of anything — it’s a fixed number of beds statewide, regardless of the amount of criminal activity that takes place by juveniles or the risk they pose to the community.”

Some children would be better off in detention than in their home environment, where they might face the same pressures that led to the first crime and be more likely to re-offend, said Aurora City Councilman Dustin Zvonek, who last year championed a city resolution asking the state to abolish the juvenile detention bed cap.

“They’re still little kids,” he said. “And to be running around neighborhoods with a weapon, running from SWAT officers, it’s hard to wrap your mind around — but it is a reality we face, and so we have to have a system in place that protects the Aurora community.”

Mclean-Riggs said children who end up in the juvenile justice system have typically first been failed by myriad other systems — from education to welfare to health care — and that a holistic approach is needed, rather than a reactionary turn to incarceration.

“The place to intervene effectively for these children is years before they touch the criminal legal system,” she said “…The view that says the answer here is pretrial detention is myopic and is not accounting for all of the other systems that were supposed to hold and intervene for this child and his family.”

It’s not clear whether the bed cap played a role in the 14-year-old’s releases in Adams County.

On the morning of May 1, when he was released on bond after it was revoked, the state had 213 juveniles in detention, said Heidi Bauer, spokeswoman for the Division of Youth Services, just under the 215 limit.

On May 17, the second time he was released after a revocation, 204 juveniles were in detention at the start of the day.

Bauer noted the number of filled beds frequently fluctuates. Over the last six months, the state’s average daily juvenile detention population has hovered between 185 and 206 youths.

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Originally Published: August 1, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.