Owing to the Extreme Youth of the Accused: The Changing Legal Response to Juvenile Homicide

In this essay, the authors seek to dispel the myth that the juvenile court was never intended to deal with serious and violent offenders; a myth that has largely been unchallenged, especially in the mainstream media, and one that critics of the juvenile court have used to undermine its legitimacy. The discovery of homicide data from the Chicago police department from the early twentieth century, the era in which modern juvenile justice came of age, provides us with new historical date with which to put this dangerous myth to rest, by showing that the nation’s model juvenile court—the Cook County Juvenile Court—did hear many cases of juvenile homicide. In addition, the database has helped us to reconstruct important parts of the overall legal response to juvenile homicide in this period. We have discovered that the early twentieth century legal response to juvenile homicide was far more flexible than today’s approach, and that there were more institutional checks in the system to protect children from overly aggressive prosecution of their cases in the criminal justice system

Scrutinizing Confessions in a New Era of Juvenile Jurisprudence

The landmark trilogy of United States Supreme Court juvenile sentencing decisions over the last decade is well known. Starting with the Roper v. Simmons 1 ruling in 2005 that abolished the death penalty for offenders under the age of 18, the Court has developed what might be called a “kids are different” Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. The last three years has seen the Court first outlaw life without parole sentences for juvenile non-homicide offenders 2 and then prohibit the mandatory imposition of this sentence on any offender under the age of 18.3 During this same time period, and utilizing a similar rationale, the high Court applied this “kids are different” approach to its Fifth Amendment jurisprudence in the constitutional consideration of custodial interrogations. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina,4 the U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement must consider a suspect’s age when weighing whether he is in custody and entitled to Miranda warnings.5 The decision marked a reversal of sorts, as only seven years earlier the Court had rejected the proposition that clearly established U.S. Supreme Court law required a consideration of age in the Miranda custody calculus.6 In J.D.B., however, the Court saw no need to “blind [itself] to the commonsense reality” that children “will often feel bound to submit to police questioning.”7 It so held, in part, based on a concern about the “frighteningly high percentage of people” who confess to crimes that “they never committed” as a result of the “inherently compelling pressures” of custodial interrogation—a problem “all the more troubling” and “acute,” the Court warned, when the subject is a juvenile.8 Even the four dissenting justices did “not dispute that many suspects who are under 18 will be more susceptible to police pressure than the average adult.”

The Three Errors: Pathways to False Confessions and Wrongful Convictions

Steven Drizin is a Clinical Professor at Northwestern Law School, the Assistant Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, and the Legal Director of the Clinic’s renowned Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC). At the Clinic, Drizin supervises law students in delinquency and criminal appeals and in wrongful conviction cases. At the Center, his research interests involve the study of false confessions and his policy work focuses on supporting efforts around the country to require law enforcement agencies to electronically record custodial interrogations. In 2008, he co-founded the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth (CWCY) where he and his colleagues represent clients who were only juveniles when arrested and use these cases to advocate for reforms in police and investigative practices aimed at preventing future wrongful convictions of youth