Twelve-year-old Alicia remembers the date of her entry into Denver's juvenile court system by heart. "July 17, 1991," she says, without having to think. On that day, the State of Colorado formally took charge of Alicia, having determined her parents were at least temporarily unfit due to their drug and alcohol problems. It was then that Alicia was assigned what is known as a guardian ad litem (GAL), a court-appointed attorney charged with representing her best interests in the proceedings to come. His name was Allen Alderman.
Through the three years that Alicia spent in the system, hearings were held on her behalf time and time again. What should be done with her? What was her "permanent plan"? Could her mother be rehabilitated to take her back home? Could her father? Each time, Alicia's guardian ad litem was called upon by the judge to determine what was in Alicia's best interests. In May 1994 Alicia was returned to her father and the case was declared closed.
To this day Alicia has no idea what Allen Alderman looks like. She says she's never met him, that he never came to visit her, and that she's never spoken with him. And, she says, he's never sent anyone from his office to meet with her in his stead.
For three years, Alderman, Denver's most prolific GAL, with hundreds of cases on his platter at any given time, merely showed up in court at the appropriate time. His presence fulfilled the statutory requirement that Alicia's rights and welfare be represented. No one else seemed to care whether he was adequately prepared, had conducted his own investigation or had even consulted with his client.
Now Alicia, a stringbean of a girl with curly blond hair who faces yet another legal battle regarding her custody, ticks off the qualifications she likes to see in an attorney. "I'd like someone to represent my interests," she says. "They actually show up. They at least go out and meet that person."
According to state law, children involved in juvenile court "dependency-and-neglect" cases--where a child is temporarily made a ward of the state while a judge determines whether they can someday be reunited with their parents--must be represented by a court-appointed guardian ad litem. The state spends $4.6 million per year on its GAL program because it recognizes that each party involved in a D&N case may have biases or motivations other than the best interests of the child. Parents can be overwhelmed by personal problems, pride, or competition with each other. And social workers, however well-meaning, may have other agendas.
"Social Services has other clients besides the child," says Denver Chief Juvenile Court Judge Dana Wakefield. "They have the taxpayer, department rules, their own administrative policy--they have other interests that may conflict with what is truly best for the child. That's why we have GALs there."
But GALs don't function like just any attorney. Because by law children are not considered competent to make their own decisions in such cases, the court appoints an attorney who is charged with recommending to the court the course of action that's "best" for the child. The theory is that the child--who otherwise would have no voice at all in the proceeding--gets someone who serves solely as their advocate, keeping their best interests above the fray in what are often lengthy, messy proceedings.
At least that's the idea.
In fact, hundreds of children wind up like Alicia, assigned to a GAL who may never even talk to them. At some court hearings, it's not unusual for the attorneys to fail to show up at all. Then there are those GALs who come to court and sit mutely while social workers and judges quibble over the fate of their clients.
Alicia will be back in court soon. Her father has become so violent that the county court has issued a restraining order against him. Now a judge must determine whether permanent custody should be awarded to Alicia's grandmother, with whom she is presently living. This time another attorney has been appointed as Alicia's guardian ad litem. When asked whether she feels bad about her first attorney, she answers, "It doesn't bother me. I got Laura."
Laura Cerasoli is in her third year at the University of Michigan law school and is a legal intern at the Children's Legal Clinic in Denver. Cerasoli picked up Alicia's case after it left Denver District Court and landed in Denver County Court.
Cerasoli says she inherited the case after the county court asked Alderman to continue with the case on a pro bono basis and he refused. She says the case "was a mess" when she got it. "The custody issue had never been resolved," she says. "The father had custody but legally couldn't see the child. The child was living with her grandmother--who had no rights whatsoever."
Cerasoli is a different kind of guardian ad litem. She says she talks to Alicia a couple of times a week and has given the child her home phone number. Last week, she says, she and Alicia even went to Elitch's together. She's not a lawyer acting as a social worker, insists Cerasoli, but a lawyer trying to find out what makes Alicia happy, which of her problems need to be worked out, and where she's most comfortable.
"How can I represent her best interests if I don't know anything about her?" Cerasoli asks. "If I didn't spend time with her, I wouldn't know she was afraid to see her dad, and I may think visitation was a great idea."
The attorneys at the Children's Legal Clinic (CLC), a private, nonprofit child-law and advocacy agency in Denver, are furious about the way some guardian ad litems conduct their business. "If you can't adequately represent a child," says CLC staff attorney Seth Grob, "then you shouldn't take the case."
Lousy representation also happens to be against the law, says Grob's colleague Scott Hollander. Hollander, the pro bono coordinator at the CLC, says both the Colorado Supreme Court's Rules of Professional Conduct and state statutes require that GALs provide many more services than most kids are currently getting.
"Almost everyone in the legal field would agree that it would be malpractice in any other instance not to meet with your client," Hollander says. "But somehow [in juvenile cases], people are beginning to accept the practice."
On the first floor of the Denver City and County Building, juvenile court is in session. The scene in the marble hallway outside isn't pretty. But the players are, at the very least, easily identifiable. The social workers are the simplest to spot: They're invariably harried-looking women burdened by stacks of case files. Then there are the teary-eyed parents and an assortment of suited attorneys.
Finally, there are the kids. They're everywhere, of every color and size. Their small, pinched faces show anger, fear, confusion or, more often, exhaustion. This is a place where lives are altered forever, usually in short, almost perfunctory hearings in which social workers hand reports to judges and parents look on, shell-shocked and sullen.
Amid this dingy collection, Allen Alderman sticks out like a sore thumb. In a blue-and-white seersucker suit, a pink floral tie whose pattern would look more at home on a deck chair, and a deep, even tan, Alderman lives in these hollows.
He is Denver's busiest GAL and its most controversial. He can be seen any day of the week at the courthouse, trying to schedule hearing after hearing in the two calendars it takes to keep his appointments straight.
Where most other attorneys take GAL work in small quantities as a supplement to their practices, Alderman has made being a GAL a lucrative career. His contract with the state calls for him to take twelve new GAL cases each month (down from seventeen just two years ago) at $600 a pop. That's a guaranteed income of at least $86,000 a year. In addition, Alderman picks up additional cases on an hourly basis from the court, receiving a set rate of $40 per hour for out-of-court work and $50 per hour for court appearances.
According to the Colorado State Judicial Department, Alderman was paid under his contract for 151 cases in the last fiscal year. That adds up to $90,600, and it doesn't include the extra hourly cases Alderman says he picks up at a rate of around eighteen a year. If he bills about the same for the hourly cases as the contract ones, Alderman is pulling down more than $100,000 a year just doing GAL cases. And GAL cases aren't all he does. According to Alderman himself, at least 10 percent of his practice is devoted to other work.
No one is quite able to put a finger on how many active cases Alderman is now covering for Denver Juvenile Court. Because cases can run through fiscal years, counting paid contract cases in a given year doesn't give an accurate picture of just how many clients Alderman is juggling.
And it's not something he's all that eager to talk about. After failing to return repeated phone calls, Alderman reluctantly agrees to talk briefly after being approached in the courtroom.
The attorney won't say exactly how many cases he has active at the moment or how much money he makes a year from them. "I've got probably around 200 cases," he says with a shrug. "I don't know. I picked up three just now but closed two this morning."
Adoree Blair, a foster parent and chairwoman of the Colorado State Foster Parents Association, says her organization puts the number of Alderman's active cases at "more like 900." Alderman disputes that figure. "Nah," he says. "Nowhere close."
Alderman acknowledges that he does get more cases than anybody else in Denver. But, he explains, that's just because he's around more. "I'm here, I'm in the courtroom, and when the judges are looking to assign a GAL, I'm available," he says.
Simply being present is a tried and true way to get GAL cases, agrees juvenile court magistrate Dan Edwards. "Frankly, half the time a GAL is appointed, it's by who happens to be available in the courtroom," he says.
And the reason Alderman can be available in the courtroom so often is because he doesn't meet personally with his clients. As a rule. Ever.
"I have a system where I hire interns from the DU School of Social Work," explains the attorney. "They come and work sixteen to twenty hours a week in my office, and they do the interview."
The interns work for school credit, not money. They're supervised by Alderman's office manager, whom he says has a master's degree in social work.
Judge Wakefield is aware of Alderman's system and endorses it. "He has a sophisticated, organized office," Wakefield says. "He makes use of a considerable number of assistants. It's very impressive."
But others aren't impressed.
Pat McElroy, an attorney at the San Francisco-based National Center for Youth Law and a published expert on guardian ad litem standards, calls Alderman's practice of not meeting personally with his clients "outrageous and pathetic."
"If you were representing an adult and this is the way you behaved, you'd be ruled incompetent," she says. "Think of it yourself: If you were a client, and your attorney never met with you but just sent an unpaid intern out to talk to you, you wouldn't keep that attorney around for very long, would you? In fact, you'd probably sue him for malpractice--that's what you'd do."
And at least some of the foster parents who have seen Alderman in action agree with McElroy.
Chet Hoover has been a foster parent for the City and County of Denver for ten years, and over that decade she's fostered eighteen children. Most of them are infants when they arrive; some are young children by the time they leave. Hoover says about half a dozen of the children in her care had Allen Alderman for a GAL. The attorney's "minions," as she describes the college interns Alderman uses to monitor his clients, "didn't have a clue."
"Sometimes they would come, these interns, maybe once every year," says Hoover. "Always a different one, so they couldn't tell if a child was changing or thriving or not developing right because they'd never seen him or her before. Some of these people weren't more than 20, 21, and didn't know anything about child development or what to look for. Nothing."
On several occasions, Hoover says, Alderman would have to argue in court whether or not her home was the best place for the child. "How would he know?" she asks. "He's never seen it. And for some kids, he doesn't even send out those minions."
Barb Givan, a foster parent for six years who's cared for six kids and adopted three of them, says several of her kids also had Alderman for a GAL. Like Hoover, she's never seen the man. "He sent out a representative twice," says Givan. "I don't remember for which kid, but it was a different representative each of the two times. I had one child for three years and never saw anyone."
Adoree Blair practically spits when she talks about it. "People are making money off the backs of children," she says, "and it's disgusting."
Roy Wallace, a Denver attorney who takes an occasional GAL case on an hourly basis, says the problem is Denver's contract system, under which contract GALs are paid a set rate of $600 to represent a child. "The state doesn't pay people enough to do a credible job on the average," says Wallace. "Most [attorneys] just show up for court hearings."
There are lots of different levels of GAL involvement, adds Wallace, "ranging from the maximum of seeing the kid a lot to the minimum of just sending someone from your office. If you're getting paid a flat fee and you have 400 to 500 cases, it's clear which way you're going to go."
Diana Rickett, a Denver lawyer who used to be a contract GAL and now will take cases only on an hourly basis, agrees. "You look at what they're paying [under contracts], and it tells you what a low regard they have for the right [to a GAL]," she says. "It's as if they want you to read reports and show up in court and that's it. It's a hollow right for the kids."
Judge Wakefield says he's also concerned about the low level of compensation. "It's really more an issue of the dollars we're going to pay," he says when asked about the performance of Alderman and other GALs. "We pay $600 for a case that may drag on for two years. It's absurd for us to think we can demand quality for that price. I'm amazed we can find attorneys to take contracts."
But Wakefield still thinks having a GAL present is crucial. "The child needs someone who can file motions on his or her behalf or provide legal skills," he says. "That's why I don't get upset when I hear of an assistant with child-development expertise going out to interview the child--and the lawyer saving himself to use his legal skills in court."
And it's in the courtroom where Alderman says the state's decision to hire him pays off. "I have experience," he says. "I've been doing this since 1985. And the volume of cases I take makes it worthwhile for me to be in court all day long."
Alderman thinks he's done a pretty good job, too.
"I'm sure there've been places I've blown it," he says. "You can't do this for as long as I have without losing a kid or two. I've had one or two die. And when that happens, I look back and say I probably could've done more for that kid."
end of part 1
