News

October 28, 2013
The New York Times

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

DENVER — James Stewart died alone.

The 17-year-old from Denver had committed a terrible act: while driving drunk, he slammed into another vehicle head on and killed its driver. Initially placed with other juvenile offenders, he was moved to the county lockup after the district attorney charged him as an adult. Left alone in his cell despite his frantic pleas to be with others, he tightened his bedsheets around his neck and killed himself.

His death, in 2008, was one of two suicides by young people in Colorado jails that helped spur a significant change in state law last year by narrowing the authority of prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults and to place them in adult jails, part of a wave of such laws nationwide.

In a reversal of the tough-on-crime legislation that swept the nation in the late 1980s and ’90s, nearly half of the states have now enacted one or more laws that nudge more young offenders into the juvenile justice system, divert them from being automatically tried as adults and keep them from being placed in adult jails and prisons.

Sarah Brown, a director of the criminal justice program at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said the shift stems from a decline in juvenile crime, concerns about the costs of adult prisons and a growing understanding of adolescent brain development showing that the young have a greater potential for rehabilitation.

The Supreme Court has increasingly taken neurological research into account on juvenile justice issues — most recently in a 2012 case, Miller v. Alabama, which barred mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for those who committed their crimes before they turned 18. Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in the case cited adolescents’ “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change.”

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By Paul Egan
Detroit Free Press

LANSING — An attorney who won a $100-million settlement stemming from sexual assaults by guards on female inmates is suing the Michigan Department of Corrections again — this time, claiming that male inmates younger than 18 have been sexually and physically assaulted by adults they have been housed with.

Ann Arbor attorney Deborah LaBelle, who won a 2009 settlement on behalf of more than 500 female Michigan prisoners who said they were sexually abused by corrections officers, filed the latest lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Tuesday.

Plaintiffs are seven unnamed John Doe prisoners who say they were sexually and physically assaulted or harassed while housed as minors in the Michigan prison system.

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The Gainesville Sun
October 2, 2013

Cases like those heard last month before the Florida Supreme Court show the need for some type of review of long juvenile sentences. One involves Shimeek Gridine, who was convicted in 2009 of shooting a 12-year-old boy in Duval County. Gridine, who was 14 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to 70 years in prison for attempted murder and robbery.

Under current state law, he would have to serve at least 25 years plus 85 percent of the remaining years. That means Gridine will likely die in prison for a crime, however terrible, that he committed when he was barely a teenager.

The Supreme Court’s decision was based in part on the idea that juveniles, by their very nature, fail to appreciate risk and consequences. Someone who committed a heinous crime as a juvenile could be a different person more than two decades later.

Whether they call it parole or something else, lawmakers should establish a review system for long juvenile sentences. Otherwise, the courts will just have to do their jobs for them.

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