Courtesy of Jason Flores-Williams
Audio By Carbonatix
On October 6, the Denver District Attorney’s Office announced that it had charged seventeen-year-old Diego Lopez as an adult in the August 8 murder of Josiaz “JoJo” Aragon, who was just days short of turning fifteen, near the Southwest Recreation Center.
This decision came as no surprise to Jason Flores-Williams, Lopez’s attorney. But he sees the trend as concerning. “I don’t really understand why we have the juvenile regime of laws if we’re going to charge juveniles as adults,” he says. “It’s disappointing that we seem to be doing that more frequently here in Denver and around the country.”
Lopez is the third juvenile to be charged as an adult by the Denver DA’s office in just over two weeks. On September 22, sixteen-year-old Jalil Mitchell, who’s accused of shooting and injuring two males (one fourteen, the other nineteen) near Denver’s East High School on September 7, was charged as an adult. And on October 4, seventeen-year-old Jameel James was charged as an adult in connection with the murder of 31-year-old Kevin Piaskowki on westbound Interstate 70 near Quebec Street on July 31.
The process of transferring juveniles to the adult system is extremely complex – so much so that the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, which charged three sixteen-year-olds as adults over a November 2021 shooting in the parking lot of Aurora’s Hinkley High School, has created a primer to outline it.
Whenever a juvenile suspect is taken into custody, according to the 18th Judicial DA’s office, law enforcement agencies are bound by the Colorado Children’s Code, which reads in part: “The information that is open to the public…regarding a juvenile who is charged with a delinquent act shall not include the juvenile’s name, birth date, or photograph.” However, it continues, “some cases are eligible for direct filing into district court – this is what is typically called ‘charging as an adult’ by the news media,” and that statute states: “A juvenile may be charged by the direct filing of information in the district court or by indictment only if the juvenile is sixteen years of age or older at the time of the commission of the alleged offense and…is alleged to have committed a class 1 or class 2 felony.”
Direct filing, which the Denver DA’s office used for Lopez, Mitchell and James, is a controversial approach explored in detail in this 2010 Westword report. Then-Colorado Juvenile Defender Division Chair Kim Dvorchak noted that the direct-file regulations had been put in place amid growing concerns about crime more than a decade earlier. “What had been happening before was that when a child committed a serious crime, the DA would have to petition the juvenile court judge to waive jurisdiction and send the case to adult district court,” she told Westword. “In the 1990s, crime went up, and the judicial transfer process was perceived as cumbersome. You had to have a hearing. There were defense lawyers involved, and they might get evaluations and evidence. It was like a mini-trial.”
A portrait of the late Josiaz “JoJo” Aragon.
Family photo via gunmemorial.org
As a result, the Colorado Legislature passed laws that let prosecutors skip the hearings. “The direct-file statute relieves a prosecutor of having to prove the child is no longer amenable to treatment in the juvenile system,” Dvorchak continued. “Even when prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, they have to give notice. It’s a separate sentencing hearing, and a jury decides whether or not to impose the death penalty. Even that level of due process is absent from the direct-file statute.”
The direct-file law was tweaked in 2012 to address some of the issues raised by Dvorchak. The most substantive change allows an attorney for an underage defendant to file a motion to transfer the case to juvenile court. At that point, a judge must set what’s known as a reverse-transfer hearing to decide whether the matter should be heard in juvenile court.
Once the decision is made to direct-file an eligible juvenile defendant, however, new rules apply. Among other things, the defendant’s arrest and criminal records can be made public, though individuals younger than eighteen are still held in juvenile facilities, not adult jails.
After charging Lopez as an adult, the Denver DA’s office released his name, booking photo and an arrest warrant. The document is heavily redacted, with the names of numerous witnesses and images blacked out. But the portions that are on view are filled with references to gangs and social media interactions, including a Snapchat photo of bloody hands that investigators connected to Lopez.
In an interview on September 28, when two of his clients were sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 murders of David Lara, 59, and DeAngelo Tafoya, 59, Flores-Williams lamented scenarios surrounding Latino gangs in Denver and said that some of them were “doing the white man’s job for them.” But for the Lopez case, he focuses his comments on the rush of information pushed out by prosecutors.
“It’s problematic when it comes to the presumption of innocence,” he says. “We haven’t even had a meaningful day in court, and already my client is being portrayed in a false light.” He points to “the adjectives used in describing the crime and linking this seventeen-year-old kid to the crime and presenting it to the public. I’m required to protect my client’s rights, and the presumption of innocence, so that when we do finally have our day in court, it’s a fair day.”
To that end, Flores-Williams offers few specifics about Lopez beyond the fact that he’d been working toward his high school graduation, and focuses on speaking generally about young people like Lopez and other clients. “There are a lot of communities that are challenged in Denver,” he says, “and the youth in these communities are challenged, too.”
