We Don’t Always Mean What We Say: Attitudes Toward Statutory Exclusion of Juvenile Offenders From Juvenile Court Jurisdiction

In the United States, juvenile offenders are often excluded from the jurisdiction of the juvenile court on the basis of age and crime type alone. Data from national surveys and data from psycholegal research on support for adult sanction of juvenile offenders are often at odds. The ways in which questions are asked and the level of detail provided to respondents and research participants may influence expressed opinions. Respondents may also be more likely to agree with harsh sanctions when they have fewer offender- and case-specific details to consider. Here, we test the hypothesis that attitudes supporting statutory exclusion laws measured in the absence of specific case-specific details may not be the best indicator of agreement with such laws in practice. We found that support for statutory exclusion was affected by exposure to information about an offender’s unique situation and by exposure to general scientific information about adolescent development. These results suggest that despite an apparent widespread agreement with automatic exclusion statutes, laypersons consider factors other than those allowed by the law when they are asked how to treat an individual offender

Plea discounts, time pressures, and false-guilty pleas in youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City.

The overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved by a guilty plea. Concerns have been raised about the potential for plea bargaining to be coercive, but little is known about the actual choices faced by defendants who plead guilty. Through interviews of youth and adults who pleaded guilty to felonies in New York City, we found that substantial discounts were offered to participants in exchange for their guilty pleas and that a sizable portion of both the youth and adults claimed either that they were completely innocent (27% and 19%, respectively) or that they were not guilty of what they were charged with (20% and 41%, respectively). Participants also reported infrequent contact with their attorneys prior to accepting their plea deals and very short time periods in which to make their decisions. Our findings suggest the plea-bargaining system in New York City may be fraught with promises of leniency, time pressures, and insufficient attorney advisement—factors that may undermine the voluntariness of plea deal decisions for some defendants