Laws Sending Kids to Adult Court at Issue in New Jersey High Court

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Tuesday, the New Jersey Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the state’s so-called juvenile waiver laws – a series of rulings that effectively allow county persecutors, and not state judges, to determine whether juvenile cases should be moved to adult courts. Currently, minors as young as 16 accused of a violent offense, such as homicide or aggravated assault, can be transferred to adult court under the state’s waiver laws, according to New Jersey’s The Record. More than 20 local and national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the state’s Public Defender’s Office, have challenged New Jersey’s juvenile waiver laws, with many arguing that the regulations – which give judges limited ability to deny prosecutor requests for moving cases to adult courts – are unconstitutional. As the laws are written today, unless a defense attorney can demonstrate a prosecutor’s request that a juvenile be transferred to an adult court is a “patent abuse of discretion,” the presiding juvenile court judge is bound by law to grant the request, The Record reports. Tuesday’s hearing centers on a 2009 Middlesex County mugging involving several juveniles – a case in which the trial judge challenged the prosecuting attorney’s request to move the case to adult court.

No Remorse? One Law Professor Studies the Impact of Emotion in the Juvenile Justice System

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Sitting behind her strikingly barren desk, with the bright, mid-winter sunlight breaking through the trees and streaming through her office windows, Martha Grace Duncan, a professor at the Emory University School of Law, in Atlanta recounts the case of nine-year-old Cameron Kocher. As she speaks her small, compact frame remains nearly motionless, betraying no emotion. But her eyes tell the story, portraying the internal mix-up of sadness, passion and nerdy intensity that she feels about the topic. Duncan may not wear her heart on her sleeve, but if you pay attention it’s not hard to find. In March 1989, on a cold, snowy day in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, Kocher fatally shot a seven-year-old playmate with a high-powered hunting rifle.

Virginia State Senate Rejects Proposal to Try Repeat Juvenile Offenders as Adults

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A Virginia Senate committee shot down a proposed bill that would have automatically transferred juveniles with repeat violent offenses to adult courts. Under Gov. Robert McDonnell’s proposal, juveniles as young as 14 could have been tried as adults in Virginia’s courts. The bill, supported by Gov. McDonnell and sponsored by State Sen. Bill Stanley -- both Republicans -- would have also given prosecutors the ability to try juveniles charged with specific gang-related crimes or multiple drug offenses as adults. Had the bill passed, minors with more than one offense of selling marijuana could have potentially been prosecuted as adults within the state’s judicial system. By an 11-4 vote, a state Senate committee rejected the legislation, with several of the sitting members stating that they were reluctant to pass a bill that took away the discretion of judges.