Summer 2026 Resource Library Updates
The Gault Center has been regularly updating our Resource Library, where you will find a broad range of youth defense resources to enhance your practice and advocacy. Below are some notable resources from the past few months that may be of interest to youth defense advocates. Please note that some of these resources are only available to registered youth defense users; to access, please log in or register on the Gault Center’s website.
From the Gault Center
Working Toward a Horizon of Interdependence: An Abolitionist Ethos for Youth Defenders
This Essay outlines the role of youth defenders in abolition and offers five entry points for youth defenders to embrace an abolitionist ethos, starting where you are. The five entry points offered in this essay are (1) Embrace a shared vision that points toward a horizon of interdependent thriving where all children are free to grow in communities of care, (2) Reckon with the juvenile legal system’s lineage of racialized social control and the need to shift power to communities, (3) Commit to a transformation within ourselves, (4) Engage in collective action toward a shared vision of interdependence, and (5) Courageously experiment with change. This essay is an ode to the youth defense community and an invitation to embrace a widened lens of how our work can fit into a broader strategy of abolition as we “imagine beyond the status quo, dream as a form of resistance, and lean into the power of collectivity to create anew, both among youth defenders and alongside community and movement leaders.”
Webinar Tip Sheet: Revolutionizing Probation from Punishment to Community-Led Safety, Part I
On March 26, 2026, the Gault Center, Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout (YEAH Philly), and the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies hosted a webinar introducing a framework to shift narratives and practices around juvenile probation to move from punishment to possibility for all youth. This tip sheet compiles some of the key takeaways and resources that came out of the webinar and offers a starting point to build narrative strategies around the need for change and community-based solutions. This tip sheet is offered as part of the Juvenile Probation Accountability Coalition.
This video, developed by youth leaders at Progeny, highlights key findings from the Five Years Later: An Update on the Kansas Youth Defense Assessment report. This video is part of the Defending Futures: Youth Defense for All in Kansas campaign to establish a statewide youth defense system and highlights the importance of building strong youth defense systems.
Caselaw Updates
In the Interest of K.W.-D., 2026 Pa. Super. LEXIS 272 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2026)
The Pennsylvania Superior Court vacated a probation revocation order because K.W.-D. was deprived of his constitutional right to notice. In this case, the Commonwealth made an oral request to revoke probation in court without filing a written motion or providing advance notice of the specific underlying allegations of the revocation request. The juvenile court then issued a “notice of review hearing” to the parties, and defense counsel had access to the youth’s progress reports. The Superior Court underscored the constitutional inadequacies at play, noting “the fact that defense counsel may have had access to some, or even all of K.W.-D.’s progress reports, does not vitiate his right to due process with respect to the notice of the Commonwealth’s intent to revoke his probation. The mere fact that defense counsel may have been aware that K.W.-D.’s progress was lacking or that he was non-compliant with some of the conditions of his probation is of no consequence. Counsel cannot be expected to guess or surmise the potential basis or bases on which the Commonwealth might opt to seek revocation of a juvenile offender’s probation. Instead, the Commonwealth was required to provide K.W.-D. and his counsel with notice of the specific allegations and evidence supporting the request to revoke his probation.” This case highlights the importance of young people’s procedural due process rights, especially the right to notice, and its interplay with the right to effective assistance of counsel.
People v. Campbell, 2026 IL App (1st) 220373-B (Ill. Ct. App. 2026)
The Illinois 1st District Court of Appeals held that a statutory minimum sentence that effectively amounted to a de facto life sentence as applied to youth violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The court reasoned that the core takeaway of Miller v. Alabama is that “there must be an exercise of real discretion” to consider the mitigating qualities of youthfulness and age at sentencing. The court stated, “The holding in Miller is rooted in society’s growing awareness that even brutal crimes may be, and frequently are, the product of the transient characteristics of youth.” This decision emphasizes the legal significance of considering youthfulness and age at sentencing and extends this consideration to statutory minimums that amount to de facto life sentences for youth.
From the Field
ICE Out: Mapping and Resisting Local Law Enforcement Collusion with ICE in Massachusetts and Beyond
This report by Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CfJJ) investigates the level of information sharing and collusion between police and courthouse staff with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Massachusetts. CfJJ filed more than 90 public records requests in the state and found that police and courthouse staff regularly share information with ICE, effectively becoming “force multipliers” for ICE. This report details specific ways police and courthouse staff are cooperating with ICE and cautions that this practice undermines public trust, legitimacy, and democratic accountability. This report offers key policy and narrative recommendations to create guardrails around information sharing practices with ICE, including a proposed ban on transmitting youth fingerprints to the FBI (which are then shared with ICE). CfJJ offered a training on this report for the Gault Center’s New England Region, and the webinar slides are available here.
This law review article by Professor Tyler Rose Clemons develops a new substantive due process jurisprudence on the right to seek joy. Tracing the historical origins of the right to liberty of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, this article connects the concept of liberty with the pursuit of happiness, or the right to seek joy. Noting that “Most humans experience the desire to align their external gender presentation with their internal gender sense as a pressing need,” this article argues that the natural desire for internal/external gender alignment is a liberty interest that must be highly protected. Applying this framework, this article examines the harms of gender-affirming care bans, especially as applied to youth, and argues that standard legislative and judicial procedures are inadequate to justify an infringement on this protected liberty interest. This article offers novel legal strategies to protect the due process right to seek joy and details critical insights around gender identity formation during childhood and adolescence for defenders to consider, especially when transgender youth in the juvenile legal system face barriers to access gender-affirming care and support.
Patrol Demographics Calculator
This new interactive tool, developed by a team of data scientists, provides racial demographic data by police patrol districts for defenders to use when building arguments about racially disparate stops. From the team: “This tool estimates the demographic composition of U.S. police patrol districts using areal interpolation of U.S. Census American Community Survey data, addressing a key gap faced by public defenders who must assess whether traffic stops reflect discriminatory enforcement or local population patterns. Because Census geographic units do not align with police patrol boundaries, the tool recalculates demographic proportions by overlaying census blocks with patrol district polygons, which are gathered through public ESRI hubs, georeferencing city maps, or Freedom of Information Act requests. The tool houses these patrol district files as well as their estimated demographics for easy downloadability.” To learn more or discuss further, please contact the team members: Julia Healey-Parera at julia.healey-parera@duke.edu, Milo Soriano at milosoriano47@gmail.com, Leon Belegu at leonbelegu2003@gmail.com, and Andreea Matei at amatei@urban.org.
