Juveniles who have been taken into custody in connection with a criminal charge present special procedural issues. Ideally, a parent or guardian has to be present before the police can question them. Alternatively, the police have to show that they used their best efforts to contact a parent or guardian…
Most people associate penalties in criminal cases with probation, incarceration and/or fines. There is, however, another court-imposed obligation that can be imposed in any case involving financial loss. A sentencing judge can, and frequently does, order the defendant to pay restitution as compensation for any monetary losses sustained by the…
This blog has previously addressed the fact that the statistics describing the state of the juvenile justice system in this country are alarming. About 53,000 juveniles are incarcerated on any given day in the United States. Many jurisdictions report recidivism rates exceeding 50% during a one to three year period. …
One of the worst things that can happen in a juvenile case is a waiver to an adult court. In some cases, usually because of the severity of the offense, a prosecutor will ask the juvenile judge hearing the case to “waive” or transfer a particular juvenile matter to an…
50 years ago last week, the United States Supreme Court decided In re Gault, which guaranteed juvenile defendants many of the same due process rights held by adult criminal defendants. For the first time, a Court held that juvenile matters are, in fact, adversarial criminal proceedings, and that juvenile criminal…
I have never believed that most lawyers or judges take juvenile delinquency cases seriously. Many of them frequently refer to these matters as “kiddie crime”. Indeed, it is not unusual for a judge who has sat in an adult criminal trial court to feel offended as a result of being…
Earlier this week, I was in the Chancery Division, Family Part for a hearing on one of my juvenile delinquency matters. While waiting to be called, I listened to the colloquy in the cases being heard before mine. Virtually every case included some discussion involving texting or social media. In…
Neither the New Jersey Code of Juvenile Justice nor the New Jersey Court Rules expressly address discovery in juvenile matters. The absence of express guidance in the statute or court rules recently led to decisions from the Appellate Division and New Jersey Supreme Court that broadened a juvenile’s right to…
In 1963, just two weeks after his 17th birthday, Henry Montgomery killed Charles Hunt, a Louisiana deputy sheriff. Montgomery was originally sentenced to die but, on retrial in 1970, received a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Montgomery is now 69 years of age and, by all accounts, became a…
New York’s Rikers Island is the second largest jail in the United States, housing between 11,000 and 12,500 inmates at a given time. It is also one of the most violent jails in the country. For many years, experts have acknowledged that placement in solitary confinement can negatively impact an…