Sentencing Juveniles to Life in Prison

2011 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 969-986 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon I. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Life Without Parole ◽  
Initial Charge ◽  
Substantive Justice ◽  
Capital Crimes ◽  
The U.S

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the sentencing of juveniles to death violated the constitutional amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, the Court most recently decided that life without parole for nonhomicide offenses is also unconstitutional ( Graham v. Florida, 2010). Part of the reason for the Court’s decisions is the lack of consensus as to the appropriateness of punishing juveniles as if they were adults. To examine the extent to which there is consensus as to the capital penalties for capital crimes, this article examines a population of young juveniles who were initially charged with murder, and then subsequently convicted in criminal court and sentenced to life in prison. As is the case with adults, not all juveniles were convicted in criminal court for their initial charge of murder. But unlike for adults, a proportion of eligible juveniles were adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court or received youthful offender in criminal court, resulting in a less severe sentence than a maximum of life in prison. The author suggests that this reduced set of sanctions, which a segment of juveniles receive, is substantive justice and the reproduction of juvenile justice. He found significant differences in the reproduction of juvenile justice by place and prior offense.

Racial Determinants of the Judicial Transfer Decision: Prosecuting Violent Youth in Criminal Court

1987 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Fagan ◽  
Martin Forst ◽  
T. Scott Vivona
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Offenders ◽  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Violent Offenders ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Minority Adolescents ◽  
Capital Crimes

In the past decade, juvenile justice policy has shifted from “the best interests of the child” to approaches blending punishment and rehabilitation. The result has been efforts to narrow juvenile justice system jurisdiction, especially for violent, serious, and chronic offenders. Judicial transfer is the most widely applied mechanism to remove juvenile offenders to criminal jurisdiction. Transferred youth, particularly violent offenders, often receive lengthy prison sentences. A disproportionate share of male, minority adolescents are arrested for serious and violent crime. Thus, the harsh consequences of transfer, compounded by racial disparities in both juvenile and criminal justice processes have major implications for serious juvenile offenders considered for transfer. Transfer as a juvenile court disposition has received little scholarly attention, and racial determinants of transfer have yet to be analyzed. This study examines racial differences in judicial transfer decisions for chronically violent delinquents in four urban juvenile courts. Though minority youth were transferred more often, race was not predictive of transfer in multivariate models combining offense and offender characteristics. Rather, offense characteristics and defendant's age at the time of the offense are the strongest contributors to the transfer decision. Murder, in particular, is a determinant of transfer. The results suggest that juvenile court judges have adopted implicit policies to reserve transfer for older violent offenders, especially those charged with capital crimes.

Has Gault Changed the Juvenile Court Concept?

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred D. Noyes
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
The State ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Juvenile Courts ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Right ◽  
The U.S

The 1967 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Gault case, which extended certain constitutional rights to children appear ing in juvenile courts for alleged delinquency, has influenced some courts to adopt criminal court procedures, with prosecutors appearing in behalf of the state. The Supreme Court appears to have rejected the principle that the right of a child is not to liberty but to custody.

The Legal Context

2020 ◽  
pp. xii-20
Author(s):  
Antoinette Kavanaugh ◽  
Thomas Grisso
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Life Without Parole ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Juvenile Sentencing ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Developmental Analysis

The chapter begins with a brief introduction, describing the scope and types of evaluations for juvenile sentencing in criminal court, offering the reader relevant terminology and an introduction to the book’s purpose. The primary focus of the chapter is on the relevant law for these evaluations. It describes relevant U.S. Supreme Court cases, especially Miller v. Alabama, which abolished mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles and required developmental analysis to inform juvenile sentencing, as well as Montgomery v. Louisiana, which required resentencing for persons previously receiving mandatory life without parole sentences as juveniles. Miller’s definitions for the standards to be applied in juvenile sentencing and resentencing are then introduced and discussed: the legal concept of “irreparable corruption” and the five “Miller factors” defining characteristics of immaturity relevant for sentencing. Finally, the chapter describes the legal process for juvenile sentencing, identifying the role of Miller evaluations within that process.

Postmodern Liberalism and the Expressive Function of Law

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
The State ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Expressive Function ◽  
Local Ordinances ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

In 1992, the city of Boulder, Colorado, passed an ordinance forbidding discrimination against homosexuals in employment and housing. Two years later, voters in the state of Colorado passed a constitutional amendment forbidding the passage of local ordinances prohibiting this form of discrimination. The constitutional amendment did not mandate discrimination against homosexuals; it merely nullified ordinances such as Boulder's. The amendment was later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

Children, Development, and the Troubled Foundations of Miller v. Alabama

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (03) ◽  
pp. 752-770
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Berk
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Legal Response ◽  
The Law ◽  
Children Development ◽  
The U.S

While the boundaries between child, adolescent, and adult are difficult to define, there is a consensus that children and adults are different in kind. Extreme acts of violence put pressure on that consensus. Children that kill, for many, create a kind of border problem for juvenile justice. That public opinion tends to align with the general claim that children who break the law should be given a break belies a deeper set of confusions. On what grounds should a seventeen-year-old that kills be treated more leniently than his eighteen-year-old counterpart? For the U.S. Supreme Court majority, the solution is to root its doctrine in a scientifically supported “developmental approach.” This article argues that this approach is philosophically confused. One must abandon, or significantly amend, that dominant understanding to explain how a principled concern with proportional punishment simultaneously justifies and limits the legal response to children that kill. The final pages sketch an alternative account that may be able to address the shortcomings of appeals to development. To punish children as adults, I suggest, is an attempt to reap the benefits of paternalism without bearing the accompanying political, social, and moral costs.

The Problem of Incarcerating Juveniles with Adults

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi Lane ◽  
Lonn Lanza-Kaduce
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Offenders ◽  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Correctional Facilities ◽  
Prison Management ◽  
Adult Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Adult Criminal Court ◽  
Transfer To Adult Court

Currently, all states allow juveniles who commit certain offenses to be waived from jurisdiction of the juvenile court to be tried and sentenced in adult criminal court. This essay reviews approaches for housing juvenile offenders in adult correctional facilities (i.e., straight adult incarceration, graduated incarceration, and segregated incarceration) and the special considerations for prison management and service delivery. The essay begins with a summary of the history of juvenile justice, focusing primarily on transfer to adult court and subsequent adult incarceration. Next, a description of the number of youths facing adult punishment is provided. The experiences of youths inside adult incarceration facilities and the effects of transfer to adult court on postrelease recidivism are discussed, followed by a review of individual states’ approaches to housing youths in adult prisons.

The Automatic Waiver of Juveniles and Substantive Justice

1993 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon I. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Juvenile Offenders ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Single Parent ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Grand Jury ◽  
Case Processing ◽  
Substantive Justice ◽  
Legislative Waiver

Legislative waiver bypasses juvenile court and juvenile justice officials by initially transferring jurisdiction over juveniles arrested for serious offenses to criminal court. Supporters of legislative waiver argue that the exclusion of offense categories from juvenile court jurisdiction best meets the punishment-oriented objectives of waiver. However, a logistic regression analysis of case processing decisions in a state with automatic transfer provisions revealed that juvenile offenders from single-parent households were more likely to face a grand jury indictment than juveniles from dual-parent households.

Certification to Criminal Court: The Important Policy Questions of How, When, and Why

1994 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Sanborn
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Transfer Phenomenon ◽  
Important Policy

Recent juvenile justice commentators have been guilty of serious misrepresentations about the process of transferring juvenile defendants to criminal court. If accepted, these misrepresentations could lead to dramatic changes in juvenile court certification policy. The purposes of this article are twofold. The first is to thoroughly explicate the transfer phenomenon and thereby neutralize the misrepresentations in the literature. The second objective is to identify the perspectives of various juvenile court workers regarding certification so as to further enable policymakers to comprehend and to address this volatile subject.

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