In April of last year, 33-year-old Solomon Galligan approached a playground at Black Forest Hills Elementary in Aurora, prompting children to flee after he lunged at one of them.
Galligan was later arrested and identified as a convicted sex offender, raising questions about how the state handles individuals with severe mental illness who are deemed unfit to stand trial.
Galligan was charged with kidnapping and child abuse, but those charges were dropped after he was ultimately determined incompetent to stand trial and sent to a psychiatric facility.
Galligan, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, has been in and out of jail for his entire adult life, according to police records.
Some insisted he is the product of a system that is severely broken and unequipped to serve the most vulnerable. Others argued that laws passed by the Democratic-led legislature have favored criminal offenders, including those with mental issues, ultimately putting the public at risk.
Both sides of that debate agree that the status quo is not working, though they offered different solutions.
Legislator: The system is set up to fail people
Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who has worked on behavioral health issues, said when an individual is found incompetent to stand trial, the law provides two options: they can undergo treatment and potentially be restored to competency, or be deemed unlikely to be restored in the foreseeable future.
Regardless of the outcome, the legislator said, the system is setting them up for failure.
Others said a system that allows charges to get dropped against a violent person is failing the victims — and the public.
For those found incompetent to stand trial, receiving mental health care to be restored to competency could take months. According to a 2022 report by Colorado Newsline, people awaiting competency restoration services had to wait an average of 88 days, up from 12 days in 2021 and 45 days in 2020.
In 2011, the law firm Disability Law Colorado sued the state over wait times for court-ordered competency services. The suit alleged the state was out of compliance with a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found that states could not detain defendants found incompetent to stand trial for an indefinite period of time.
Eight years after the suit was filed, the state entered into an agreement that requires it to meet specific deadlines for transporting inmates with mental illnesses to to mental health facilities.
The lawsuit has led to a number of changes, including the passage of a bill establishing the Bridges Wraparound Care Program, which helps individuals with mental health needs who are facing criminal charges.
However, the waitlist is still far too long, said James Karbach, director of legislative policy for the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender.
“It’s been 14 years, and we have more people on the waitlist today than when the lawsuit was filed,” he said.
One of the primary reasons for the long waitlist is the shortage of available beds at the state’s mental health facilities.
According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, Colorado has 482 psychiatric beds — 192 are designated for patients admitted through the civil court process, and 290 are for individuals who are not involved in the criminal justice system.
The center considers 50 beds per 100,000 people to be “minimally adequate treatment” for individuals with severe mental illness; Colorado has about eight beds per 100,000 people.
Even if someone is able to get a bed at a facility, there’s no standardized criteria for determining whether they have been restored to competency, Amabile says.
“Right now, one mental health professional can say, ‘Bob, you look good today. I don’t think you meet criteria for a civil commitment anymore,’ and you can be released, and that’s probably inadequate,” Amabile, the Boulder legislator, said. “We absolutely have to have a way for people to be released, because a lot of people will get better, but we need some process of determining when that’s happened.”
The only way to get more beds is to pay for them, Amabile said, but the state has forgone that for the past several years due to budgetary constraints.
Advocate: Civil commitment should be the last option
The majority of individuals with severe mental illness are not violent, Karbach said, but those few instances where violence occurs are the ones that attract news coverage and lead to fears about public safety.
In those most serious cases, the violent crime is often the culmination of a series of less-serious offenses paired with a lack of preventative care, he maintained.
“Many clients stay very short amounts of time in the system without any real resources or care to stabilize them over the long-term,” he said. “We see people that are in and out of those systems and in and out of legal trouble in the criminal legal system, often starting with small charges, and then as their mental illness goes untreated and they’re incarcerated, we often see an escalation of charges.”
Karbach added: “We would see less of that if we dealt with the mental health system better up front.”
For every person who makes the news for committing a serious crime, there are dozens more who are cycling in and out of the system as their mental illness worsens, advocates said.
“They’re pushed out of the system, whether they’re restored or not,” he said. “Then they’re released and go back to being homeless, and they reoffend, and it’s a really big and preventable tragedy. If we just had the services in place before they ever had to be arrested, it could actually help prevent crime and in some cases save lives.”
Those services, which included voluntary, community-based care, are few and far between in Colorado, according to Jack Johnson, a policy liaison for Disability Law Colorado.
“The No. 1 thing we see above all else that is a problem with our system, and especially the laws that we’ve created, is that we don’t offer people the opportunity to receive voluntary care in the lowest possible setting, so they become sicker, and some of them, because of their sickness, commit crimes,” he said.
Johnson argued that involuntary commitment should be the last resort.
“What we can do is provide people with optional community-based treatment ahead of time — it’s cheaper, it helps more people, it prevents crime, and it doesn’t violate their rights and liberties. A civil commitment should be the last option for people to take only when everything else has failed and nothing else is available,” he said.
Outrage over decision to drop charges
The decision to drop charges against Galligan outraged some of the parents at the Aurora school, where he allegedly tried to kidnap children.
“My son comes home from school and he tells us, ‘Hey, this guy tried to take me and my friends,’” Denver White told Denver7, adding his needed therapy after the incident and there was a time when he wouldn’t leave his parents’ side.
“This isn’t a left and right issue. This is a systemic issue,” Dante told Denver7. “We need to go back and re-evaluate this because obviously it’s not working. This isn’t the only case where something like this has happened.”
“For me, it’s been anger,” Brooke Maltarich, another parent, told CBS News Colorado, referring to the kidnapping attempt.
“He’s supposed to feel safe and he had just left the playground minutes before this gentleman walked on the playground,” she said of her son.
Worries about the safety risk of releasing people with mental health issues accused of violent crime have been raised, most recently in the case of a suspect accused of stabbing four people and killing two of them in downtown Denver.
Elijah Caudill, the suspect charged in that deadly 16th Street Mall knife attack, was released from custody months before the stabbings because of a mental competency court liaison program that state lawmakers tripled in size two years ago, an expansion that a legislative budget analyst now says needs better data collection to ensure effectiveness.
Two months before the stabbings, Caudill, 24, left the Denver jail, with the assistance of the Bridges program, the new agency in the judiciary that helps coordinate services for defendants struggling with mental health disorders.
Caudill had been in and out of custody, homeless at times, with a 15-count arrest rap sheet that included a felony menacing knife attack when Denver County Court Judge Kelly Cherry ordered him freed from the Denver jail after the Bridges program agreed to help coordinate services for him.
At the time of his release from the Denver jail, Caudill faced three separate criminal cases, ranging from the groping of a woman at a detox facility to an assault against two inmates and an incident in which he repeatedly kicked a glass door and shattered it in the jail’s recreation yard.
Last week, an advocacy group highlighted Galligan’s case, saying it’s a “glaring problem that needs to be immediately addressed,” if a special session were to be convened by the legislature this month.
In particular, Advance Colorado pointed to a state law requiring charges to be dropped for a Class 5 or 6 felony after one year if the accused is still believed to be mentally incompetent. For a class four felony, charges must be dropped after two years.
The group argued that there should be no time limit requiring the dropping of charges for any level of felony, calling the current statutes a loophole that is allowing “dangerous felons to be released back on the streets” when correctional facilities are full.
“This is one factor contributing to Colorado’s status as the second most dangerous state in the nation,” said Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado. “If the Governor calls the legislature back for a special session, there is no question he should include this public safety issue in his call.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors have balked at policies emanating out of the state legislature dealing withe crime.
“The Colorado legislature continues to value dangerous offenders over victims by creating safe harbors designed to protect defendants, and their statutory schemes have been signed into law by Governor Polis,” said 4th Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen. “Coloradans will continue to suffer until our legislature and governor put a real priority on public safety.”