Gateway to Adult Court for Young Defendants Slowly Closing

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In a Georgia courtroom last month, 11-year-old Dalton Archer plead guilty to murdering his father’s girlfriend near Christmastime last year, when he was 10. Archer automatically went through juvenile court, something that took years of fighting for a similar defendant in Pennsylvania. Though changes are happening across the country, not all young people are guaranteed a juvenile court hearing instead of adult court for very serious crimes. In 1997, Oklahoma law specified that children as young as 7 could be handed to adult courts, according to a 1998 report from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. At that time, about one-third of the states set some floor age between 10 and 15 for eligibility for transfer to criminal court.

Nonprofits Leverage Goldman Sachs for Detention Programs

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A set of New York City nonprofits are working together to keep Rikers Island juvenile detention center residents from returning, and are using money from investment banker Goldman Sachs to do it. About half of the 16- to 18- year-old males who pass through Rikers Island will return within a year, according to David Butler, who’s heading the team working on the project at nonprofit social research organization MDRC.  “Anything we can do to change that is good,” he said. MDRC will oversee the ABLE program, which will be mandatory for the young men at Rikers by the time it is fully rolled out in January 2013 for a four-year run. The Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience is a method of teaching things like personal responsibility, anger management and impulse control with the aim of restructuring the student’s way of thinking. And it could not have been deployed on the Rikers scale, perhaps 3,400 students annually, without the cash Goldman Sachs agreed to provide.

Attorneys General Respond to Juvenile Life Without Parole Ban

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Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court says juvenile murderers cannot automatically be sent to prison for life without the chance at parole, attorneys general, soon to be joined by courts, are laying down what may be influential alternative sentences. The Supreme Court’s Miller v. Alabama decision in June 2012 invalidates mandatory sentencing laws in 28 states and federal court that send juveniles convicted of murder straight to life without parole. The court said juveniles are less mature, therefore less culpable, and entitled to present mitigating factors to a sentencing judge. In Florida, where Miller may affect more than 200 people, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledges that some inmates are entitled to relief, but in an early case, her office argues that a replacement sentence is already set. Down in the Florida panhandle, a Bay County jury in 2009 found Jose Gonzalez guilty of murdering a man the year before during a robbery, when the defendant was under 18.

Comics Journalism: ‘Jessica Colotl: In the Eye of the Storm’

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Jessica Colotl says her life is a series of hearings since the struggle began between her and federal and state authorities over whether she can stay in the country she's called home since she was ten years old. Read the English version here and the Spanish version here. Colotl is young; she's in limbo like many other immigrants, her story shifts from her college to a detention facility to a presidential announcement to a tenuous freedom. It's a story that's dramatic, tense, and now it's presented in a way more accessible to young people. Furthermore, the story is reported through an innovative new form: illustrative or comics journalism.

After High Court Decisions, States Slowly Lightening Juvenile Sentences

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As Supreme Court arguments from two key juvenile sentencing decisions trickle down through courts and legislatures nationwide, the heaviest sentences for juveniles may be on the verge of shedding some weight. “Graham and Miller put a constitutional ceiling on what states can do to kids,” argues Los Angeles attorney David Durchfort, continuing, “the big question now is what’s the safe zone? How far can they [states] go in punishing kids without giving them a second chance?”

Graham and Miller, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 and 2012 respectively, bar state laws that mandate life without parole sentences for juveniles. In both cases, the court said children are immature from a brain chemistry point of view. Therefore they are more corrigible and less culpable than adults and cannot rightfully be sentenced to life without parole until a judge takes that youthfulness into consideration.

New Study: Juveniles Miss Chances at Appeal

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 A new collection of data in a report appearing in the University of Miami Law Review suggests that not only do juvenile defendants rarely appear in appeals courts, but that the lack of appeals means they are often treated less justly than adults. Fewer than one in 50 kids appeal delinquency sentences, suggests data from the 14 states that were able to compile something usable for Megan Annitto, director of the West Virginia University Center for Law and Public Service. Florida children appeal most often among her study states: 1.67 times per 100 cases on average from 2007 to 2010. The lowest appeal rate in the study was Utah, at less than one appeal per 2,000 cases. The average among the states is one out of 200.

Ohio Facility Shares Youth Detention Award with Drawn-Down Utah Center

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Just as the last residents are preparing to move out of Utah’s oldest youth detention center, the departing staff and their building near Salt Lake won an award for excellence in operations, beating out competitors from 17 other states. Weber Valley Detention Center was already scheduled to close due to budget cuts before it won the Performance-based Standards 2012 Barbara Allen-Hagen Award in July.  The award recognizes one youth detention center and one correctional facility annually for best implementation of the Performance-based Standard model for improving rehabilitation and quality of life for youth inside. The award “represents a lot of hard work on part of the employees there even though they knew it would close,” said Susan Burke, the state of Utah’s director of Juvenile Justice Services. The award comes from the PbS Learning Institute, a nonprofit offspring of the federal Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Florida Struggles with Youth Life Sentences

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Two years on, the ground-zero state in the fight over juvenile life without parole for crimes like armed robbery and rape has yet to settle what to do with such offenders. A case before the Florida Supreme Court may lay out sentencing guidance before the dragging state Legislature decides how to sentence for crimes that are now getting between four and 170 years. There are 115 inmates eligible for a resentencing under the May 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case of Graham v. Florida, according to Ilona Vila, director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole Defense Resource Center at Barry University School of Law in Orlando. Florida has more Graham cases than in any other state. The Supreme Court opinion counted 129 nationwide, 77 of them in Florida.

Study Re-Starts on Juvenile Justice Overhaul for Georgia

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After more than five years of drafting, a comprehensive juvenile justice reform bill is expected to appear in the Georgia General Assembly in January, which would give children in the court system access to updated intervention and rehabilitation. A juvenile justice subcommittee will be formed soon out of the Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal to study adult and child justice codes.  The full committee held its first meeting July16, where it heard a background briefing from the Pew Center on the States about juvenile justice in other states. The subcommittee will build on at least five years of work that ended in House Bill 641, a bill that died in the legislature in March. “We hope to find things to make improvements to the current 641,” said bill author state Rep. Wendell Willard (R-Sandy Springs). When it died in March, the 246-page bill brought the state’s juvenile justice code up to date with best practices about how to treat juveniles in the court system, whether as defendants, abuse victims or both.  It also created a category of juveniles called “children in need of services,” who do things considered unruly, but not quite criminal, such as skipping school, running away from home, or breaking curfew.

Appeals Accepted in First Miller Cases

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Less than three weeks after a Supreme Court ruling mandated it, an Iowa court gives two inmates the right to appeal the life without parole sentences they were given years ago when they were 17 years old. “We’re thrilled to see these concrete steps being made,” said Jody Kent Lavy, director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “They are obviously required to do so,” she added. The Iowa cases may be the first nationwide re-opened under Miller v. Alabama. The Supreme Court said in Miller that sentencing judges must consider mitigating factors in dealing with juvenile homicide cases.