Judges dabbing tears from their eyes is rare inside a courtroom, but the 18th Judicial District’s Mental Health Court is a different kind of court.
“I’m gonna bring this box of Kleenex with me,” Arapahoe County Magistrate Laura Findorff said as she walked from her bench to the center of her courtroom last week.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys sit at the same table, along with counselors and court staff. Success is celebrated. Second chances are common. And a genuine bond develops between defendants and a system that has failed them before.
Friday marked the court’s first “graduating class” of “convicts” since it launched more than two years ago. Four participants, each with a diagnosed mental illness and history of criminal problems, walked out of the courthouse free from the constraints of probation and with a confidence they didn’t have when they started in the fledgling system.
Of all the court’s success over the years, Friday was arguably its biggest.
“This was the opportunity for the people in this program to now take charge of their lives, to take charge of what mental illness and drug abuse and criminal thinking had taken away from them,” Findorff said Friday, that box of tissue close at hand. “They now have a new life and begin fresh.”
It’s an intensive program that saw the four graduates — Jessica Pacheco, Elizabeth Monaghan, Don Lambert, and Chris Ellsworth — thrive, despite past struggles with the justice system.
Lambert, a towering 43-year-old, said the court saved him from a meth addiction that soon would have killed him.
“When I first came in here, I was depressed. Beyond depressed, I wanted to die,” he said.
Even though he had caring parents that were part of a support network many addicts lack, Lambert said he simply didn’t care about himself enough to let anyone help him.
While the other three graduates boasted clean records throughout the program, Lambert stumbled twice, falling back into meth use only to bounce back and stick with the program. Magistrate Findorff called those incidents “blips” in an other wise successful program.
The court started in late 2009 after more than a year of research and work by former administrator Gina Shimeall, Arapahoe County District Attorney Carol Chambers, Chief Judge William Sylvester, Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health Network and probation officials.
Supporters see the court as a way to keep the mentally ill from the revolving doors of county jail and prison, where officials estimate about 20 percent of the inmates have some form of mental illness. A history of drug use is common for the 40 people participating in the court, and officials say that drug use is often a direct result of their mental illness.
Chambers said that by keeping the mentally ill out of prison, the program saves taxpayers money. And in many cases, because the defendants are habitual offenders facing lengthy prison stretches, that savings stretches into the tens of thousands each year for each convict, she said.
“It’s a huge savings of lives and savings of money,” Chambers said.
Launching a program unlike any other in the state required a leap of faith, Judge Sylvester said. But Friday’s graduation and the success of current participants shows that the court is thriving, he said.
“The beauty of problem-solving mental health courts is that they do work,” he said.
As evidence, he polled the participants seated in the jam-packed courtroom for Friday’s ceremony. Each of their hands shot up in agreement.
But the courts have critics.
The Bazelton Center for Mental Health Law in Washington D.C. has argued in recent years that the courts aren’t an ideal solution for people with mental illness because they further embroil the mentally ill in a criminal justice system they don’t belong in to begin with.
“Mental health courts are a late-stage intervention for people who are needlessly placed at risk of contact with criminal justice systems,” the organization wrote on its website. Dominic Holt, a spokesman for the group, said experts were unavailable to discuss the issue this week, but the group added on its website that the primary problem facing the mentally ill is a lack of stable housing and difficulty in accessing services. Those issues need to be addressed earlier, before the mentally ill come into contact with law enforcement, the group argues.
Shimeall, however, said that one of the goals of the program is to help defendants access the treatment services they need. Among last week’s graduates, for example, Shimeall said work is already underway to get them enrolled in programs at Arapahoe/Douglas and other agencies around the state and country.
Shimeall, who is now working to launch a similar court in Colorado Springs, said now that the program has its first graduates, there is concern that they could struggle without the structure the court offered. But, she said, relationships with service providers are in place and officials hope the graduates can come back to work as peer counselors.
“They’ve done it, lived it through the addiction and the mental health issues,” she said.
The graduates also have been through the rigors of the court, which are far more intense than a typical probation program. Beyond regular drug screenings, participants meet every day with a caseworker and spend the first few months of the program living at a group home with the other participants.
During a lengthy speech after graduation, Lambert, who is rarely at a loss for words, said one of those times when he got caught using meth stands out as an important milestone in the program.
While the caseworkers and the judge were clearly disappointed in his drug use, Lambert said their main concern wasn’t tossing him back in jail. They wanted to help him.
“They didn’t look down on me for doing the meth, they gave me help,” he said. “Even after that day, they didn’t look down on me.”
Reach reporter Brandon Johansson at 720-449-9040 or bjohansson@aurorasentinel.com