Judge Philip B. Gilliam (1907-1975)
by
Jack F. Smith, Senior Judge

            Probably no single name is more associated in the public mind with the Denver Juvenile Court than that of the late Judge Philip Brewster Gilliam.  From his election to the Court’s bench in 1940, to his death in 1975 - at age 68 - Judge Gilliam’s name was virtually synonymous with the Denver Juvenile Court and Juvenile Hall.  Gilliam, who knew and corresponded frequently with the Court’s original founder, the controversial Judge Ben B. Lindsey, often cited Lindsey’s pioneering zeal as the inspiration his own work.

            Judge Gilliam was born in Denver on November 6, 1907.  He was the fifth of six children of Edward and Mary McDonald Gilliam of Gillette, Colorado.  He attended Wyman School, Morey Junior High, and East High School.  He attended the University of Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Denver in 1932.  He was admitted to the  Colorado bar that same year.  Three of his brothers – Tom, Edward and Don – had become lawyers, and Gilliam joined them in the practice of law during the Depression of the 1930’s. 

            In 1934, Gilliam married Sara Rice, of Norfolk, Nebraska.  They had two sons, Eric and Edward, but the marriage ended in divorce.  Gilliam married Charlotte Gulette, of Denver, in 1953.  The couple adopted two daughters, Julie and Mary.

            Prior to being elected to the Denver Juvenile Court bench, Gilliam served as a municipal judge in Denver.  In 1936, at age 28, he was appointed by Mayor Ben Stapleton to the Denver municipal bench.  At the time he was the youngest judge in Denver history.  In 1940, he ran on the Democratic ticket, and was elected to the bench of the Denver Juvenile Court.  From that date until his death in 1975, Gilliam’s personal energy and public popularity were focused on the emerging juvenile court.

            In an article, written in 1969 and now housed in the Colorado Historical Society Library archives, Gilliam detailed his friendship with Judge Ben B. Lindsey.  He acknowledged the importance of Lindsey’s pioneering work in the field of special treatment of juvenile offenders.  Gilliam visited Lindsey in California shortly after his election to the bench, and a life long friendship followed.  Lindsey had been no stranger to controversy – much of it resulting from his own personality and published writings.  Gilliam’s life was not to be an exception to this pattern. 

            From his election in 1940 until 1965, when the Colorado Legislature added an additional judgeship to the Denver Juvenile Court bench, Gilliam served as the sole juvenile court judge for Denver. As an elected official he was immensely popular.  At his death the Denver Post reported that in his re-elections of 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1960 he drew more Denver votes than former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy.

 Judge Gilliam marshaled this considerable public popularity to develop increased community support and resources for the juvenile court.  Through local funding and private donations he directed a $1 million expansion of  Denver’s Juvenile Hall.  The building, at 28^th and Downing Streets, now bears his name – the Philip B. Gilliam Youth Services Center.  Significantly, the school at the detention center was staffed by teachers from the Denver Public Schools. 

With private support Gilliam established a rural work program at Daniel’s Park, south of Denver, to serve as a less-restrictive alternative for incarcerated youth.  The boys housed at the Daniel’s Park facility lived in trailers and performed trail maintenance in the Denver Mountain Parks, west of Denver.  Today, tourists are unaware that the large routed wooden signs in the parks were made by the young residents of the Mountain Parks Work Program.  The program was also responsible for maintaining the large buffalo herd that still calls Daniel’s Park its home.

Throughout his life Gilliam was active on a national scale through the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.  He served as President of the National Council of Juvenile Court Judges in 1953.  Gilliam was one of a powerful group of juvenile court judges from cities throughout the country – cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Birmingham, Atlanta and Memphis – who continually kept the vision of specialized treatment for juvenile offenders in the public eye.  In 1965, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, he visited 15 countries as a specialist on juvenile and family problems.

In the 1960’s, the highly touted success of juvenile courts began to be called into question by lawyers and social workers concerned with the lack of legal protections for children charged with crimes.  The hallmark of juvenile courts prior to the 1960’s had been the lack of legal formality, with an emphasis on community-based treatment and rehabilitation.  This lack of legal formality, charged the critics, had resulted in numbers of youth being placed in locked settings without the legal protections afforded to adult defendants.  Prior to 1967, the decisions of most state courts had supported this lack of formality under the ancient legal doctrines of  parens patriae and in loco parentis.  Simply put, these doctrines held that the juvenile court stood in the place of a wise parent to afford guidance and treatment to a juvenile charged with crimes.  These informal, often unrecorded, proceedings focused less on the proof of guilt, and more on the need for rehabilitation.

The movement toward increased legal formality culminated, in 1967, in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, In Re Gault.  The case involved an Arizona boy who had made an allegedly obscene telephone call to a neighbor.  Following an appearance before an Arizona judge, which was not subject to any verbatim record, the youth was committed to a locked state reform school.  The decision in the Gault case mandated, as a matter of constitutional protection, that before being sentenced to a facility a child was entitled to notice of the charges, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses against him, and the privilege against compelled self-incrimination.  This decision, and others which followed at the state level, became known as the “Gault revolution”.  Throughout the country, the result was increased legal formality in juvenile courts that had hitherto been conducted quite informally.  In Colorado this change was accompanied by the Legislature’s the enactment of a comprehensive Colorado Children’s Code.  This newly-enacted Code embodied the constitutional requirements that had become the touchstone of the post-Gault era.

To Judge Gilliam, and to many juvenile court judges who had spent their careers in courts that limited legal formality, the Gault revolution threatened the juvenile court’s vision which stressed special treatment for children.  Gilliam, and his fellows, expressed fears that juvenile courts would come to resemble nothing more than mini-criminal courts.  While the debate on the wisdom of the Gault pronouncements raged nationally, the Denver Juvenile Court, and its supporting agencies and programs, began diligently to make accommodations to the new requirements.

This change in legal climate, and the accompanying requirements of the new Children’s Code, obviously wore personally on Gilliam.  He experienced increasing health problems, and in December 1973, after 33 years of service, he resigned from the bench.  He resumed a part-time practice of law following his resignation.  However, his health continued to decline, and he died on April 9, 1975.  The continuation of the programs he had created and nurtured, and the heightened public awareness and support for proper treatment of children still serve as lasting memorials to a judge whose life was tirelessly devoted to children.  Judge Gilliam was fond of quoting a phrase from an article he had framed in his chambers, “We call him ‘his Honor’ to remind us of our own.”