The juvenile court system is supposed to ensure that young people accused of crimes have legal representation, even if their families can’t afford a lawyer.
But in Cuyahoga County, some courtrooms resemble hiring halls for favored attorneys who get hundreds of assignments yearly, while others get none.
In one year, the juvenile court paid at least 60 attorneys to represent hundreds of children accused of crimes. Of those, judges steered more than two-thirds of the work to just 10 of the lawyers, according to a Marshall Project - Cleveland analysis of the most recent case data and state reimbursement filings.
Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court’s system of handpicking attorneys to represent children and parents appears to flout national best practices, state guidelines and the court’s own rules.
The commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services publicly said this month that the agency was working with lawmakers to address oversight gaps at juvenile detention facilities across the state. But behind the scenes, the department is working to water down a bill that would do just that, according to one of the bill’s sponsors and others working on the legislation.
Last Saturday, a San Bernardino sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Ryan Gainer, an autistic Black 15-year-old, outside his home in Apple Valley, California. The shooting, which is under investigation, came after Gainer chased the deputy with a large bladed garden tool, according to police and body camera footage released by the department. The teen’s family had called 911 when he became upset during a disagreement, broke a glass door and struck a relative. They told CNN that by the time deputies arrived, Ryan had calmed down and apologized.
For the past few years, guns have been identified as the leading cause of death for children in the United States. There were 2,571 children age 1 to 17 who died in shootings in the U.S. in 2021, 68% more than the 1,531 that occurred in 2000.
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Research revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in a May 2022 survey did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had been trained, many received such instruction only once in their careers.
Just three days before her 15-year-old son carried out a mass shooting at his Michigan high school in 2021, Jennifer Crumbley was captured on security camera leaving a shooting range with the handgun in tow. She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”
Recently, at one of the writing workshops that I teach at three juvenile lockups in and around my hometown of St. Louis, one of my students posed a provocative question: “Why should I write about changing the world when the world doesn’t care about me?”
The roundtable discussion focused on the importance and effectiveness of mentoring and encouraged participation in mentorship opportunities for Florida’s youth.
In 2019 on Halloween, my wife and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys. The police lined them against a wall, cuffed them and took them away.
When you say the names of the Chicago communities where I grew up, they may evoke negative images. Both are neighborhoods with some of the city’s highest rates of gun violence. I grew up in North Lawndale and have lost friends and family on its streets. In the spring of ninth grade, one of these murders changed my life.
The judge responsible for the administration of a troubled juvenile detention center in rural southern Illinois abruptly moved to close it as of Dec. 31, citing staffing shortages that made it difficult to meet new state standards governing the treatment of youth in custody.
A 65% reduction in youth incarceration between 2005 and 2021 and the closing of two youth prisons during that time are among the great strides of Redeploy Illinois, an innovative Cook County program allowing communities to tailor state-funded juvenile treatment services to meet their particular characteristics and needs.