The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday sided with The Colorado Sun and 9News after a five-year legal battle over whether the state child welfare division had to release data from the child abuse hotline.
The case will return to the trial court, which is expected to order the Colorado Department of Human Services to release the data that The Sun and 9News asked for in 2021.
The news organizations, which were investigating the number of children and teens who run away from residential centers, wanted to know how many calls were made to the child abuse hotline from three residential centers in the Denver area from 2018 to 2021. State human services officials denied the request, citing the children’s privacy.
The case stretched for years and made it to the highest court in Colorado, which decided Monday that releasing the number of hotline calls made from each of the centers would not reveal the identities of the children who were the subject of those calls.
Journalists sought the information through the Colorado Open Records Act while investigating the safety of children in residential centers, including the death of a 12-year-old boy who ran away from Tennyson Center and was struck and killed by a vehicle.
At the time, the centers — Cleo Wallace, Tennyson Center for Children and Mount Saint Vincent — were state-licensed residential centers.
The records request did not ask for children’s names or details of the reports to the hotline. It asked for the number of calls made during those three years from each center and the number of calls that were investigated.
Justice Carlos A. Samour, who wrote the majority opinion for the seven-member court, quoted former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who defended people’s right to privacy and the “right to be let alone.”
“Yet he also staunchly spoke out about the importance of transparency, famously observing that ‘sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman,’” Samour wrote.
Unless the Attorney General’s Office, which is representing the state human services department, files for a rehearing, the case is expected to return to the lower court within two weeks, and the judge of that court is expected to issue an order requiring the state to release the data requested five years ago.
The attorneys for the news organizations, including First Amendment rights lawyer Steve Zansberg, will seek to have the state human services department cover their fees.
In arguments before the court in September, the news organizations’ attorney Michael Beylkin, argued that it was impossible to figure out a child’s identity with only an aggregate number — a tally of total calls to the hotline that likely is hundreds of calls per year. The point of the request, he said, was to help determine whether specific residential treatment centers are doing their best to protect vulnerable children.
The news outlets were able to obtain police data for their investigative series about the growing problem of children running away from residential treatment centers. The Denver Police Department was called to Tennyson Center for Children 357 times in 2020. Denver police were called to Mount Saint Vincent treatment center, also in the northwestern part of the city, about twice per week on average in 2019 and 2020.