Counseling Counsel for Children

You are a lawyer working in juvenile court, representing children in proceedings in which their parents are accused of being unfit. Your clients range in age from newborns to seventeen-yearolds. At any one time you have 125 active cases on your docket. You work hard at your job, and you believe deeply in the rights of the children you represent. Occasionally, it occurs to you that you don\u27t really have as good a sense as perhaps you should of your precise role and how you ought to discharge your responsibilities to your clients. But you don\u27t ever seem to have the time to work through such theoretical issues. You are too practical to consider more than the need to get through your daily docket. Even though lawyers (and other representatives such as guardians ad !item) have been representing children in child protective proceedings for more than twenty-five years and are currently serving that function in every jurisdiction in the United States, there is no uniform definition of a lawyer\u27s role and responsibilities in this context. As a result, lawyers have been remarkably free - or remarkably burdened - to figure this out for themselves. Even worse, in almost any state . . . one will encounter within the state a deep disagreement about [one\u27s] role (p. 33)

J.D.B. and the Maturing of Juvenile Confession Suppression Law

The Supreme Court‘s decision in J.D.B. v. North Carolina in 2011 marks a watershed moment in the jurisprudence of juvenile rights. Addressing a question left open in Miranda v. Arizona more than four decades ago, the Court made clear in J.D.B. that a judicial determination of whether a minor suspect is in custody for Miranda purposes must take into account the age of the suspect because juveniles cannot be held to the same standard as adults. When one considers the broader context of the Court\u27s criminal law jurisprudence of recent years, it is apparent that J.D.B. reflects the Court\u27s willingness to extend, into new areas of criminal law, a recent line of cases that treats age eighteen as a central dividing line in how the Eighth Amendment regulates the sentences of capital punishment and life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. When one looks even further back into Supreme Court history, it is evident that J.D.B. marks a return to special protections for youth that characterized the Court\u27s confession suppression caselaw more than half a century ago. This Article begins by looking back at juvenile confession suppression law in the half century preceding J.D.B. and examines the evolution of the doctrines applied in J.D.B. Part I demonstrates the special solicitude that the Court accorded juveniles half a century ago under the due process standard of voluntariness of statements and examines how and why this special protection was diluted in the ensuing decades. Part II focuses on J.D.B. itself. This section examines the new direction the Court took, the various ways in which J.D.B. diverged from the confession suppression jurisprudence of preceding years, and how the decision built upon the reasoning of recent Eighth Amendment caselaw. We also take a close look at the legislative facts in the J.D.B. decision and consider the implications of the Court having taken judicial notice of these legislative facts. Part III presents our views of the changes that J.D.B. demands of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Part III.A shows that J.D.B.‘s restructuring of the standard for one aspect of Miranda analysis requires commensurate changes in all other aspects of the Miranda doctrine and other constitutional rules governing police interrogations. Part III.B presents our view that J.D.B., properly extended, requires that counsel be afforded to any minor suspect prior to and during any police interrogation