An Eighth Amendment Analysis of Statutes Allowing or Mandating Transfer of Juvenile Offenders to Adult Criminal Court in Light of the Supreme Court’s Recent Jurisprudence Recognizing Developmental Neuroscience

From the introduction: ” Recent Supreme Court cases have recognized the science underlying the common-sense notion that children are not “little adults.” Their brains function in a completely different manner than those of adults. In 2005, the Court abolished the juvenile death penalty and recognized the neuroscience underlying the claim that those under the age of eighteen should not be subject to the ultimate punishment due to the fundamental immaturity of their brains. Later cases, discussed in depth below, followed similar reasoning in abolishing life without parole for nonhomicides for juvenile offenders and in holding that juvenile offenders cannot be subjected to a mandatory life sentence even for homicide. In each of these cases, the Court applied an Eighth Amendment analysis. In contrast, cases assessing the constitutionality of procedures employed in juvenile delinquency courts employ the “fundamental fairness” test dictated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The first cases to evaluate the constitutionality of the procedures used to transfer juveniles to adult court utilized a due process framework. This was consistent with the analysis of early cases that reviewed the procedures used in delinquency court. This article argues that, in light of the Court’s holdings in Roper, Graham, and Miller, direct file procedures must also be analyzed under the Eighth Amendment. As Justice Fortas noted in Kent, the “decision as to waiver of jurisdiction and transfer of the matter to the [adult criminal court] was potentially as important to petitioner as the difference between five years’ confinement and a death sentence.”  In most states, juvenile jurisdiction ends, at the latest, at the child’s twenty-first birthday. In Florida, for example, the maximum sentence that can be imposed on a juvenile is commitment to a juvenile commitment program for the length of time applicable to an adult, or until the child’s nineteenth birthday, whichever is shorter. Therefore, a sixteen-year old facing a charge of armed burglary of a dwelling can be sentenced to a juvenile commitment facility until his nineteenth birthday if the case is filed in juvenile court. In stark contrast, if the juvenile is charged as an adult, he faces several decades in prison, perhaps as many as seventy years. Given that the result of an adult charge could be the equivalent of life in prison-and in light of the developmental neuroscience recognized by the Supreme Court-procedures used to transfer youth to adult criminal courts must comport with the Eighth Amendment.”