The Gault Center and Juvenile Law Center Amicus Brief, In the Interest of Ahmad Jackson
This amicus brief prepared by The Gault Center and Juvenile Law Center argues that Louisiana must grant jury trials in juvenile court given the persistent deficiencies in Louisiana’s juvenile legal system including the punitive nature of consequences youth face and the dire and harmful conditions of the state’s jails. Furthermore, amici argue there is a growing trend among states to grant jury trials since young people now face harsher sentencing and disposition as well as an several other changes that have made the juvenile system more punitive than rehabilitative.
From the Argument in the Brief: “Seven years ago, this Court ruled, in In re D.J., 817 So.2d 26 (La. May 14, 2002), that “a trial by jury in a juvenile proceeding is not constitutionally required under the applicable due process standard in juvenile proceedings.” 817 So.2d at 34. In the intervening years, persistent deficiencies in Louisiana’s juvenile justice system, as well as a state trend toward granting juveniles the right to trial by jury in certain circumstances, leave this Court no choice but to re-evaluate its holding in In re D.J. and grant Louisiana’s juveniles the right to a jury trial.
To reach its holding in the case below in the case below, this Court relied on the United States Supreme Court’s plurality decision in McKeiver, as well as the sentencing disparities between juvenile and adult courts. It followed the “vast majority of states,” id., that, at the time that D.J. was handed down did not provide jury trials to juveniles. However, it is now clear that each of these reasons fails to support this Court’s ruling in D.J.
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Remarkably, the McKeiver plurality acknowledged that the reality of juvenile court fell far short of the ideal to which the Court so fiercely hewed, so that children were in fact not receiving the individualized, rehabilitative attention they deserved. The plurality enumerated a litany of the juvenile justice system’s profound shortcomings. Id. at 544. But, even in the face of “all these disappointments,” the plurality concluded that the system was not so damaged as to require the Court to jettison the ideal of the intimate, informal, rehabilitative juvenile justice system altogether. Id. at 545. As one scholar has stated, McKeiver based its decision on “juvenile courts’ ‘rhetoric’ rather than their ‘reality.”‘ Barry C. Feld, The Constitutional Tension Between Apprendi and McKeiver: Sentence Enhancements Based on Delinquency Convictions and the Quality of Justice in Juvenile Courts, 38 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 1111, 1150 (2003).
The concurrences shared no common ground with the plurality. Justice White agreed that juries were not constitutionally required in delinquency proceedings, because the primary goal of the juvenile justice system was treatment, and because the “the consequences of adjudication [in juvenile court] are less severe than those flowing from verdicts of criminal guilt.” Id. at 553. Justice Harlan concurred in the judgment, steadfast in his conviction that Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968), wrongly extended the right to trial by jury to state proceedings. Justice Brennan concurred with the judgment as to the Pennsylvania case, and dissented with the judgment as to the North Carolina case.
The precedential value of the McKeiver decision is limited since the plurality and concurring opinions share no common rationale. The Court has stated that the holding of a plurality opinion is the narrowest ground as to which an agreement among five justices can be inferred. Marks v. US., 430 U.S. 188, 193 (1977) (expanding on and quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 169 n.15 (1976) (opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.)) (“When a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining the result enjoys the assent of five Jusices, ‘the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds . “‘) Because neither Justice Harlan’s nor Justice Brennan’s opinions adopt the rationale of Justice Blackmun’s opinion, the McKeiver plurality stands for the judgment of the Court alone.
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In the decades since the McKeiver decision, state juvenile code provisions across the country have become more punitive. The purportedly benevolent nature of the juvenile justice system underwent permanent changes in the 1990s when legislators reacted to a sharp increase in juvenile violent crime that gave rise to the notion of a “super-predator,” a term elevated to prominence by everincreasing attention by the media. 8 See Ernestine S. Gray, Symposium: Children, Crime and Consequences: Juvenile Justice in American Articles: The Media-Don’t Believe the Hype, 14 STAN. L. & PoL’Y REV. 45 (2003); James Forman, Jr., Community Policing and Youth as Assets, 95 J. CRIM. LA w & CRIMINOLOGY 1, 24 (2004). As one commentator has noted, a substantive and procedural convergence between juvenile and criminal courts “has transformed juvenile courts from nominally rehabilitative welfare agencies into scaled-down, second-class criminal courts for young people.” Barry Feld, Violent Youth and Public Policy: A Case Study of Juvenile Justice Law Reform, 79 MINN. L. REV. 965, 966 (1995).
These legislative changes included: changes to the purpose clause of juvenile codes to include goals of punishment, accountability and public safety; opening delinquency proceedings to the public; requiring juvenile’s fingerprints and other identifying information to become part of either an adult or juvenile database; opening juvenile court records to the public, victims, schools, prosecutors, law enforcement and social agencies; and requiring sex offender registration for juveniles adjudicated for certain sex offenses. See OJJDP, State Legislative Responses to Violent Juvenile Crime: 1996-97 Update. Harsher disposition or sentencing schemes became more prevalent, such as mandatory terms of commitments for certain types of serious offenses. States also began to enact “blended sentencing” laws or Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction statutes.
Louisiana fell in step with this trend, enacting a series of legislative provisions that changed the fundamental character of Louisiana’s juvenile courts. For example, discarding the traditional confidentiality of the juvenile court, Louisiana’s juvenile court proceedings are now open to the general public under a broad array of circumstances. The Louisiana’s Children Code now requires public notification when a child, regardless of age, is accused of committing a violent crime, La. Ch. C. Art. 412(1), and the district attorney has discretion to publicly release the complete names of accused children. La. Ch. C. Art. 412(H)(l). Felony-grade delinquency records are now more accessible to any law enforcement officer. See La. Ch. C. Art. 412(B)-(F) (listing ten exceptions to the rule that juvenile court proceedings not be disclosed). These types of changes render McKeiver’s underlying premise untenable today.
More recently – and perhaps in response – a countervailing trend has developed, in which states have determined that juveniles facing these increasingly procrustean measures have the right to trial by jury. Currently, a total of twenty-one states and the District of Columbia provide jury trials to juveniles in varying circumstances. Eleven states provide jury trials to juveniles as a matter of law. 9 In the remaining ten states and the District of Columbia, 10 jury trials are permitted in situations where the juvenile is subject to enhanced penalties.”
