Mauffray Recused From Jena Six Media Request

Judge J.P. Mauffray has recused himself from the decision over whether to open Mychal Bell’s juvenile proceedings to the public. Thomas Yeager, an Alexandria judge, was selected by the Louisiana Supreme Court yesterday to replace Mauffray. Yeager, in turn, has set a hearing for November 21 to decide whether to grant a media consortium’s request to be given access to Bell’s trial in juvenile court and for a gag order to be lifted.

Playing With Fire

An unidentified boy confessed yesterday to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that he was playing with matches on October 21 and accidentally started a fire that wiped out 38,000 acres in northern Los Angeles County and destroyed twenty-one homes. The Buckweed fire, as it’s being called, was one of perhaps fifteen blazes that consumed Southern California last week. The boy was interrogated by arson investigators and later released to his parents–the DA’s office has not announced whether it plans to press charges. I presume, or hope, that a competent lawyer was present during the interrogation and that the boy has been made aware of his rights.

Death Penalty Moratorium?

Is there a de facto national moratorium on lethal injections? Judging by the Supreme Court’s decision to spare Mississippi death row inmate Earl Berry from execution tonight, the smart money says yes.

Right Way, Rhode Island?

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Rhode Island legislature’s recent decision to lower the age of adult court jurisdiction to 17 and how, just four months after the bill was passed, state officials were already starting to see signs of failure.

Contrary to the predictions of the bill’s supporters–notably Republican Governor Don Carcieri–and in line with the criticisms of juvenile justice advocates who had seen the danger of the measure, the transfer is not cutting costs, is creating confusion and is inappropriately exposing teens with petty crimes on their record to a harmful, and hardening, environment.

Carcieri had thought he could save some cash and close a deficit gap by transferring the 17-year-olds, typically housed at $98,000 per bed per year on the juvenile side, to adult prison, where beds cost roughly $40,000 per year. The catch, of course, which would have been immediately apparent had he bothered to consult the experts and prison staff, is that 17-year-olds are kept in protective custody when they’re admitted to the adult system, which is more expensive than juvenile facilities.

Now, thankfully, lawmakers are considering a repeal. They are planning to meet tomorrow in a special session of the House Finance Committee to discuss, among other things, a Senate proposal to reintroduce those 17-year-olds back to the juvenile system. If they won’t listen to the advocates on this one, here’s hoping they’ve at least figured out the cost savings.

NYT Praises Missouri Model

Someone on the New York Times editorial page is as fixed on juvenile justice as I am. Exhibit A: yesterday’s New York Times editorial, extolling the virtues of the Missouri model. There’s nothing “newsworthy about the setup, which has been around for quite a while, and no major reports were published last week, to my knowledge, about the failures of “adultified” juvenile prisons. But nevertheless, I was glad to see it get some attention. Read it here:

The Right Model for Juvenile Justice

With the prisons filled to bursting, state governments are desperate for ways to keep more people from committing crimes and ending up behind bars. Part of the problem lies in the juvenile justice system, which is doing a frighteningly effective job of turning nonviolent childhood offenders into mature, hardened criminals. States that want to change that are increasingly looking to Missouri, which has turned its juvenile justice system into a nationally recognized model of how to deal effectively with troubled children.

The country as a whole went terribly wrong in this area during the 1990s, when high-profile crimes prompted dire predictions of teenage “superpredators” taking over the streets. The monsters never materialized. In fact, juvenile crime declined. But by the close of the decade, four-fifths of the states had made a regular practice of housing children, even those who committed nonviolent crimes, in adult jails. Studies now show that those children were considerably more likely to become serious criminals — and to commit violence — than children handled through the juvenile justice system.

But all juvenile justice systems are not created equal. Most children taken into custody are committed to large, unruly and often dangerous “kiddie prisons” that very much resemble adult prisons. The depravity and brutality that characterizes these places were underscored in Texas, where allegations of sexual abuse by workers prompted wholesale firings and a reorganization of the state’s juvenile justice agency.

Missouri has abandoned mass kiddie prisons in favor of small community-based centers that stress therapy, not punishment. When possible, young people are kept near their homes so their parents can participate in rehabilitation that includes extensive family therapy. It is the first stable, caring environment many of these young people have ever known. Case managers typically handle 15 to 20 children. In other state systems, the caseloads can get much higher.

The oversight does not end with the young person’s release. The case managers follow their charges closely for many months and often help with job placement, therapy referrals, school issues and drug or alcohol treatment. After completing the program, officials say, only about 10 percent of their detainees are recommitted to the system by the juvenile courts.

A law-and-order state, Missouri was working against its own nature when it embarked on this project about 25 years ago. But with favorable data piling up, and thousands of young lives saved, the state is now showing the way out of the juvenile justice crisis.

Genarlow Wilson to Be Released Today

The Georgia Supreme Court, in a 4-to-3 ruling, vacated Genarlow Wilson’s sentence today and set him free. Wilson was convicted at age 17 on trumped-up charges of aggravated child molestation for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. The court ruled today that the mandatory sentence of ten years, which shocked even the jury in the trial, was “grossly disproportionate” considering that the act, which took place at a party in 2003 and was caught on tape, “did not rise to the level of culpability of adults who prey on children,” which the law he “broke” was intended to address. That law has since been changed to make sexual activity between teenagers on opposite sides of the legal divide a misdemeanor.

Adolescents and Substance Use/Abuse

New numbers out today on substance use among adolescents, courtesy of this brief report by the Health and Human Services-affiliated Office of Applied Studies. In 2006, the study found,

• One-third of 12- to 17-year-olds in the United States consumed alcohol,
• one-fifth admitted to illegal drug use,
• and one-sixth admitted to smoking cigarettes.

Regarding first-time use, 10.6 percent tried alcohol, and 5.8 percent experimented with drugs. On any given day, almost twice as many adolescents smoked cigarettes as consumed alochol (roughly 1.25 million compared with more than 630,000), and marijuana use trailed not far behind (586,454). Rates of alcohol and drug use among adolescents have been dropping since 2002, the report finds, although rates of treatment for substance abuse have been steady. In 2005 adolescents as a group made up 7.7 percent of all US residents in treatment centers.

Baltimore Sun: Time to Outlaw LWOP

The Baltimore Sun devoted its editorial today to the Equal Justice Initiative’s report on juveniles serving life without parole. Here it is, in full:

Too Young to Die in Prison
Teenagers serving life sentences without the possibility of parole have been condemned to die in prison. It’s a death sentence without an executioner, it’s perilously close to cruel and usual punishment, and it simply shouldn’t be allowed.

States, such as Maryland, that let juveniles spend the rest of their lives behind bars ignore what researchers and others have shown to be true: These offenders lack the physical and emotional maturity to make rational decisions. A life sentence, with the appropriate parole eligibility requirements and restrictions, would keep these young criminals behind bars for a lengthy period and prevent their release until an appropriate time.

A report issued last week by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative found that nationally, more than 2,225 juveniles, age 17 and younger, have received life without parole sentences. Of those, 73 were 13 or 14–children by almost any measure–when they committed their crimes.

In some states, life without parole is mandatory for certain crimes, which precludes a judge from considering a youth’s family background, schooling and emotional health. That is neither fair nor just.

In Maryland, even without a mandatory imperative, 18 inmates are serving such sentences for crimes they committed as 15-, 16- or 17-year-olds.

Their crimes may have been terrible, but there is a reason we have different systems for juvenile offenders: Society recognizes the differences between teenagers and adults; the key difference is that parts of their brains that control impulses, emotions and reasoning are less developed.

Juveniles are barred from buying cigarettes or beer; they can’t enlist in the military and aren’t supposed to watch R-rated movies unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. And yet when they commit a serious crime, it’s as if they have morphed into adults for purposes of their punishment.

Their age makes them vulnerable to older criminals who single them out to commit serious crimes because they can be easily influenced and intimidated, and potentially can escape the adult system. But, in fact, many of them don’t.

The Supreme Court recognized all these differences when it barred the execution of juveniles, no matter the crime. But a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole is just as fatal in its way, and should be prohibited for the same reasons.

Until the practice is outlawed nationally, the Maryland legislature should exempt juveniles from life without parole sentences and improve prison education and training programs. That would give youthful offenders serving time in adult prisons a chance to reform and show they can lead productive lives outside prison someday.

Also, click here to see what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had to say about the issue in its October 19 editorial. And click here to see what the Birmingham News editorial staff wrote about it yesterday.

Protesters Demand Justice for Anderson

The call for justice in the case of Martin Lee Anderson grew louder today, as an estimated 700 protesters marched to the federal courthouse in Tallahassee. The demonstrators, organized by the NAACP, are demanding a federal civil rights investigation against the seven Bay County boot camp guards and nurse who were acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury on October 12. The protesters also singled out former Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Guy Tunnell, who, they claim, made racist remarks about the case and tried to prevent the dissemination of the surveillance tape that captured the defendants repeatedly beating Anderson (even after he’d gone limp) and shoving ammonia tablets in his face.

The day after the verdict the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office in Tallahassee announced that they had begun reviewing the case to see if there are grounds for federal obstruction charges against the defendants, who filed misleading reports on the incident. Today US Attorney Gregory Miller and Justice Department officials met with some of the NAACP organizers inside the courthouse, and Miller and colleagues from the civil rights division and the FBI later met with Anderson’s parents and their counsel. According to the Associated Press, Miller’s office issued a statement saying that “if there is sufficient evidence to establish a prosecutable violation of any federal criminal civil rights statutes, appropriate action will be taken.”

Media Orgs File for Access to Jena Case

A consortium of news organizations have filed a petition to open up Mycal Bell’s juvenile trial, claiming First Amendment rights. The move challenges Judge J.P. Mauffray’s decision to keep the proceedings closed and to impose a gag order on all parties involved in the case. “Mauffray’s orders run counter to Louisiana juvenile laws, precedents set by the Louisiana Supreme Court and provisions of both the Louisiana and U.S. Constitutions,” the petition asserts.

The closure order, according to the document (which is cited in the Shreveport Times), “unquestionably violates Article 879(B) of the Louisiana Children’s Code, which provides: ‘All proceedings in a juvenile delinquency case involving a crime of violence as defined in R.S. 14:2(B) or a delinquent act which is a second or subsequent felony-grade adjudication shall be open to the public.’”

In related Jena Six news, Bryant Purvis is scheduled to be arraigned on November 7.