‘He raised hell’: Pioneering Miami juvenile court judge Thomas K. Petersen dies at 80
The how-to manuals for incoming juvenile-court judges don’t include chapters on being more like Thomas K. Petersen, a revered judge at the Children’s Courthouse in Miami: Petersen made social worker-type home visits to kids and their parents. He was known to dress as Santa to bring presents to children stuck in lockup for Christmas. He once took a kid to a Marlins game as a reward for completing community service.
Petersen, who died of what appeared to be a heart attack Friday afternoon, worked from his own playbook. He was 80.
Over three decades as a prosecutor, public defender and judge in MiamiDade, Petersen was credited with developing reform-minded programs — usually from scratch — that later became national models.
When mothers at the Liberty Square housing project complained they had to walk miles to buy milk, Petersen founded Liberty Mart, a convenience store staffed by residents. When studies showed that the best antidote to delinquency was an education, he created TROY — Teaching and Rehabilitating our Youth — an academy for at-risk teens. When kids lamented they needed on-the-job training, he developed Teen Cuisine, a celebrated lunch counter staffed by youths at the Miami-Dade Detention Center.
“He used each of his positions to do the good he thought the world needed,” said Marie Osborne, a retired assistant public defender who practiced before Petersen in juvenile court for several years. “He did not let the position define what he wanted to do. It was simply a vehicle for the good he wanted to do. That was the theme of his legacy.”
A native New Yorker and graduate of Columbia University Law School, Petersen moved to Miami in 1966 to work as a volunteer for the federal VISTA anti-poverty program in impoverished sections of Miami. He never left.
He joined the Public Defender’s Office as the first assistant exclusively representing children following the a U.S. Supreme Court decision that required the appointment of attorneys for minors charged with crimes. After a year, he left to join the State Attorney’s Office, where he created the first pretrial intervention program in the Southeastern U.S., designed to divert first offenders from the criminal justice system.
At the State Attorney’s Office, Petersen served as legal advisor to the Dade County Grand Jury, where he shepherded the publication of so-called “presentments”
— reports signed by grand jurors seeking to reform various institutions. In that role, he exposed abuses of the foster care system, the mistreatment of elders in nursing homes, failing probation programs and poorly run schools.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor since 1993, said Petersen took her “under his wing” when she was a young attorney and convinced her that lawyers could use the grand jury system and other powers to improve their communities.
Fernandez Rundle credits Petersen — along with her other mentor, the late state attorney and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno — with pioneering a host of programs, including advocates for survivors of domestic violence and treatment for offenders with mental illness or substance-abuse histories. The two believed prosecutors could reduce crime by attacking its root causes, including poverty, Fernandez Rundle said.
“They were trendsetters in terms of showing prosecutors all over the country that you could still be tough on crime and reduce victimization through smart alternative pathways,” Fernandez Rundle said.
“He appealed to the humanitarian side of me, the side my parents instilled when I was young,” she said. “He broke the myth I had that prosecutors were just about putting people in jail.”
For most of Petersen’s career, “the system” meant children. Attorneys assigned to Petersen’s court recall that his “calendars went on forever” because he would probe deeply into the lives of every child appearing before him. Juvenile calendars, Osborne said, are like fast-food restaurant menus, meant to get in and out quickly: “You order hamburgers, French fries and a Coke.”
But Petersen lingered. He forged relationships with the kids and their parents. He parsed their school histories. He looked for ways to reach them.
When kids complained about the dreariness of their surroundings at the lockup, Petersen brought in volunteers to help plant trees and vegetable gardens, said Public Defender Carlos Martinez. Petersen often forwarded scholarly articles or newspaper pieces to Martinez, “usually about some innovation somewhere in the country he thought we could do down here.”
Petersen was loath to give up on any of the children, and much of his work involved efforts to save kids who were getting in trouble at school and picked up by cops — but who still had a chance to avoid incarceration at an adult prison.
One of Petersen’s kids was a boy from Liberty City whose story was documented in detail on the cover of the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine in 1992. The youth was at a crossroads: He had been kicked out of even the county’s “alternative” schools, including the one called “Last Chance.” His mother had refused to take him back home. He was 13, and already had been arrested three times.
The youth, Petersen said then, “is a kid right now. This is about the last time we can feel sorry for him. From here on out, he’s going to get bigger and bigger, and we’ll forget about the problems with his home life and everything else. And then we’ll just look on him as a criminal.”
The magazine article closed with Petersen gently lecturing the teen: “You can’t let me down. I want to keep being a judge, and I want you to keep staying out of trouble.” Within a decade, Martinez said, the boy was dead.
Around 1995, frustrated and outraged by the large number of kids being tried and sentenced to prison as adults, Petersen retired early, Osborne said. “He saw that as a bankrupt policy,” she added. “He said, ‘I did not become a juvenile judge to preside over trespass cases.’ ”
Petersen’s tenure as a crusading judge tallied just as many victories, though. Petersen routinely asked the teens appearing before him about conditions in the youth jails and prisons where they were housed. When one described barbaric conditions within a lockup in Pahokee, Petersen inspected the facility himself, Osborne said.
“He took pictures. He sent them to all the legislators. He raised hell,” Osborne said.
Juvenile justice administrators shut the place down.
Petersen is survived by his wife, Irene. A funeral will be private, and a celebration of his life will be announced at a later date.
Carol Marbin Miller: 305-206-2886, MarbinMiller