NCJ Number
184857
Date Published
2000
Length
34 pages
Annotation
This chapter analyzes judicial decisions and laws that govern youths' waivers of the privilege against self-incrimination and the right to counsel.
Abstract
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision In re Gault emphasized the disjunctions between rehabilitative rhetoric and punitive reality and engrafted greater procedural safeguards onto juvenile courts' individualized sentencing schema, thereby fostering their procedural and substantive convergence with criminal courts; however, providing a modicum of procedural safeguards legitimated greater punitiveness in juvenile court. The historical irony of these changes is that race provided the impetus for the Supreme Court's focus on procedural rights to protect minorities' liberty interests, but now the more punitive juvenile court sentences fall disproportionately heavily on minority offenders. Despite juvenile courts' convergence with criminal courts, "Gault" constitutes an incomplete procedural reform, a "due process revolution" that failed. The legal system manipulates the fluid concepts of childhood and treatment to provide youths with fewer procedural safeguards than those accorded adult criminal defendants. States' legal policies on waivers of "Miranda" and the right to counsel illustrate the inequality that results from judging youths by the legal standards used for adults; most States resist providing youths with greater procedural protections than those afforded adults in order to achieve equality, because doing so would frustrate the primary crime-control functions of the juvenile court. 116 footnotes