Law Commons^™

Reimagining Criminal Justice: Black And Brown Youthin Gang Database Are Guilty Until Proven Innocent, Irish Tapia

Reimagining Criminal Justice

Young men of color growing up across this nation face a hurdle most of us will never have to imagine. If a student of color is not diverted to the criminal justice system, suspended or expelled, they might nonetheless be labeled and marked as having gang affliations, based solely on the discretion of local law enforcement.This ‘identity’ has significant long-term consequences. The “shared gang database” is real. Individuals named in the database do not have to agree to be listed, and they also do not have control over getting off it. A young man of color in a public school, …

Feigned Consensus: Usurping The Law In Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions, Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, Julie A. Mack, David A. Moran, Barry C. Scheck, Thomas L. Bohan

Articles

Few medico-legal matters have generated as much controversy--both in the medical literature and in the courtroom--as Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), now known more broadly as Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). The controversies are of enormous significance in the law because child abuse pediatricians claim, on the basis of a few non-specific medical findings supported by a weak and methodologically flawed research base, to be able to “diagnose” child abuse, and thereby to provide all of the evidence necessary to satisfy all of the legal elements for criminal prosecution (or removal of children from their parents). It is a matter, therefore, in …

Life Is A Highway: Addressing Legal Obstacles To Foster Youth Driving, Lucy Johnston-Walsh

Faculty Scholarly Works

The simple and relatively mundane act of driving a car, which many of us take for granted, can have a profound impact on many aspects of adulthood. The ability to drive a car can provide a means to pursue education and employment, to earn income, and to ultimately obtain independence. As a young adult, a car is often the first acquired asset, which leads to developing credit history for other major life purchases. Owning a car may also be a significant contributor to a person’s economic wellbeing and future buying power. Yet the simple act of driving a car is …

More Than The Vote: 16-Year-Old Voting And The Risks Of Legal Adulthood, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Advocates of 16-year-old voting have not grappled with two significant risks to adolescents of their agenda. First, a right to vote entails a corresponding accessibility to campaigns. Campaign speech is highly protected, and 16-year-old voting invites more unfettered access to minors by commercial, government, and political interests than current law tolerates. Opening 16-year-olds to campaign access undermines a considered legal system of managing the potential exploitation of adolescents, which sometimes includes direct regulation of entities and also gives parents authority in both law and culture to prohibit, manage, or supervise contacts with every kind of person interested in communicating with …

Compassion: The Necessary Foundation To Reunify Families Involved In The Foster Care System, Katherine Markey, Vivek Sankaran

Articles

Compassion plays a critical role in ensuring that stakeholders can engage with, and support parents trying to reunify with kids in the foster care system. This Article will explore the compassion crisis in foster care, will present the research documenting the impact of compassion on engaging families, and will identify key steps stakeholders can take to incorporate compassion into their work.

Restorative Practices In Baltimore City Schools: Research Updates And Implementation Guide, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, Deborah Thompson Eisenberg, Anastasia W. Smith

C-DRUM Publications

Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) and other school districts across the United States are implementing restorative practices (RP) to improve school climate by building meaningful relationships in school communities, reframing school discipline, and supporting student safety, well-being, and success. This transformational approach centers student voice and agency, and enhances students’ engagement and participation in their own learning. The Center for Dispute Resolution at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and Open Society Institute – Baltimore (OSI) collaborated to create The Restorative Practices in Baltimore City Public Schools: Research Updates and Implementation Guide. The purpose of …

Caregivers’ Expectations, Reflected Appraisals, And Arrests Among Adolescents Who Experienced Parental Incarceration, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Melissa Noel

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

This research sought to identify a potential process by which intergenerational crime occurs, focusing on the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ subsequent arrests. We drew from Matsueda’s work on reflected appraisals as an explanatory mechanism for this effect. Thus, the present research examined whether caregivers’ and adolescents’ expectations for adolescents’ future incarceration sequentially mediated the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ actual arrest outcomes. Propensity score matching was used to examine this effect in a sample of 1,735 15- to 16-year-olds using NLSY97 data. Parental incarceration was positively related to caregivers’ expectations of adolescents’ future arrest. Moreover, caregivers’ expectations …

Professor Katherine Franke Joins Supreme Court Brief Urging Limits To Religious Exemptions In Same-Sex Parenting Case, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

New York, New York — Yesterday, Professor Katherine Franke (Faculty Director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project and James L. Dohr Professor of Law) and 8 other scholars of law and religion filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. The case raises the question of whether a Catholic social service agency that accepts public funding from the City of Philadelphia to provide child welfare services, can use that funding to deny services to same-sex couples seeking to adopt or foster children.

Children In Foster Care: The Odds Are Against Them, Shawna Doughman

GGU Law Review Blog

Most child welfare reports that lead to removal of children from their homes are filed for neglect rather than abuse. Often, their parents want to take care of them, but are failing for one reason, or for many. Nonetheless, the lion’s share of the $30 billion annual budget of state and federal child welfare funding goes overwhelmingly to foster care and adoption services which remove the children from their parents, instead of to helping those families care for their own children.

THE S

Lgbtq Youth Homelessness And Discrimination In The Child Welfare System, Markie Flores

Poverty Law Conference & Symposium

Despite the existence of LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws, LGBTQ youth are still being discriminated against within the foster care system. The primary cause of all youth homelessness is family conflict, and LGBTQ youth are more susceptible to family conflict when they come out to their parents. The Williams Institute surveyed 354 agencies throughout the United States who work with LGBTQ homeless populations and found that 68% of clients have experienced family rejection. The True Colors Fund notes that more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ teens are forced to leave their homes after coming out to their parents. LGBTQ youth also face …

#Metoo And The Myth Of The Juvenile Sex Offender, Cynthia Godsoe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Public Opinions Of Unmanned Aerial Technologies In 2014 To 2019: A Technical And Descriptive Report, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Janell C. Walther, Carrick Detweiler, Sebastian Elbaum, Adam Houston

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

The primary purpose of this report is to provide a descriptive and technical summary of the results from similar surveys administered in fall 2014 (n = 576), 2015 (n = 301), 2016 (ns = 1946 and 2089), and 2018 (n = 1050) and summer 2019 (n = 1300). In order to explore a variety of factors that may impact public perceptions of unmanned aerial technologies (UATs), we conducted survey experiments over time. These experiments randomly varied the terminology (drone, aerial robot, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aerial system (UAS)) used to describe the technology, the purposes of the technology (for …

Juvenile In Justice: A Look At Maryland's Practice Of Incarcerating Children Without A Jury Trial, Kelsey Robinson

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Foster Care: Why Our Current Approach To Child Welfare Has Failed, Vivek Sankaran, Christopher Church

Articles

Over the past decade, the child welfare system has expanded, with vast public and private resources being spent on the system. Despite this investment, there is scant evidence suggesting a meaningful return on investment. This Article argues that without a change in the values held by the system, increased funding will not address the public health problems of child abuse and neglect.

Evaluating The Facilitating Attuned Interactions (Fan) Approach: Vicarious Trauma, Professional Burnout, And Reflective Practice, Katherine Hazen, Matthew W. Carlson, Holly Hatton-Bowers, Melanie Fessinger, Jennie Cole-Mossman, Jamie Bahm, Kelli Hauptman J.D., Eve Brank, Linda Gilkerson

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Background: This evaluation examined the use of the Facilitated Attuned Interaction (FAN) approach to reflective practice among child welfare and early childhood professionals working with vulnerable children and families.

Objective: The aims of the current evaluation were to test (a) the role of vicarious trauma in predicting professional burnout, (b) the effect of reflective practice quality in decreasing professional burnout, and (c) the ability of reflective practice quality to lessen the relationship between vicarious trauma and professional burnout.

Participants and Setting: The sample included sixty-three professionals across diverse professions including child welfare social workers, early childhood educators, and child welfare …

Republican Attorneys General Association V. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, 136 Nev. Adv. Op. 3 (Feb. 20, 2020), Nicholas Hagenkord

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court determined that (1) the district court did not err in denying appellant Republican Attorneys General Association’s (RAGA) petition for a writ of mandamus under the Nevada Public Records Act (NPRA) seeking bodycam footage regarding juveniles and former State Senator Aaron Ford’s interactions with police; and (2) the district court abused its discretion in denying RAGA’s request for other requested records by not assessing whether these records contain any nonconfidential material.

Developmental Justice And The Voting Age, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Several municipalities have lowered the voting age to 16, with similar bills pending in state legislatures and one considered by Congress. Meanwhile, advocates for youth are trying to raise the ages of majority across an array of areas of law, including ages for diverting criminal conduct into the juvenile justice system (18 to 21); buying tobacco (18 to 21); driving (16 to 18); and obtaining support from the foster care system (18 to 21). Child welfare advocates are fighting the harms of Adultification, meaning the projection of adult capacities, responsibilities, and consequences onto minors. In legal and social history, seeing …

Mandatory, Fast, And Fair: Case Outcomes And Procedural Justice In A Family Drug Court, Melanie Fessinger, Katherine Hazen, Jamie Bahm, Jennie Cole-Mossman, Roger Heideman, Eve Brank

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Objectives: Problem-solving courts are traditionally voluntary in nature to promote procedural justice and to advance therapeutic jurisprudence. The Family Treatment Drug Court (FTDC) in Lancaster County, Nebraska, is a mandatory dependency court for families with allegations of child abuse or neglect related to substance use. We conducted a program evaluation examining parents’ case outcomes and perceptions of procedural justice to examine whether a mandatory problem-solving court could replicate the positive outcomes of problem-solving courts. Methods: We employed a quasi-experimental design that compared FTDC parents to traditional dependency court parents (control parents). We examined court records to gather court orders, compliance …

Child Maltreatment Reporting Statistics During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Cursory Analysis, Alison L. Hansen

Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics

This goal of this research is to provide a cursory analysis of publicly available child maltreatment data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of total allegations of child maltreatment between the months of March and June—a span of time representative of the COVID-19 pandemic thus far—were analyzed in five different states in the years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. An analysis of total numbers of allegations and the percentage change in allegations per year revealed a disproportionate decline in child maltreatment reports during the COVID-19 pandemic. This data corroborates nationwide reports of decreases in child maltreatment allegations in the …

Education Is The Most Appropriate Response To The Phenomenon Of Voluntary Teen Sexting, The Erin Levitas Initative For Sexual Assault Prevention

C-DRUM Publications

No abstract provided.

Lessons From Disaster: Assessing The Covid19 Response In Youth Jails & Prisons, Madalyn K. Wasilczuk

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Prison: Pathways And Prevention, Margaret Brinig, Marsha Garrison

Journal Articles

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for curbing crime and delinquency and demonstrate the inadequacy of current reform efforts. Our analysis relies on our own, original research involving a large, multi-generational sample of unmarried fathers from a rust-belt region of the United States as well as the conclusions of earlier researchers.

Our own research data are unusual in that they are holistic and multigenerational: The Court-based record system we utilized for data collection provided detailed information on child maltreatment, juvenile status and delinquency charges, child support, parenting time, orders of protection, and residential mobility for focal children (the …

Enabling The Best Interests Factors, Adrián E. Alvarez

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

For over a century, state courts and other child welfare agencies in the United States have been applying the “best interests of the child standard” to all decision-making concerning children. The standard is also enshrined within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—a treaty that every nation in the world has ratified except the United States. Notwithstanding its widespread adoption in family law, the standard is, with only a few exceptions, noticeably missing from American laws and policies pertaining to children in the immigration system.

There is a rich literature arguing that children should enjoy special …

Conversations On The Warren Court's Impact On Criminal Justice: In Re Gault At 50, Cara H. Drinan

Scholarly Articles

This Article examines the Supreme Court’s landmark In re Gault decision of 1967, in which the Supreme Court ushered in the “due process era” of juvenile justice in America by determining that juveniles were entitled to the right to counsel and other procedural safeguards during delinquency proceedings. But this Article continues with a critical focus on the impact of the decision today, examining a dichotomy between what was declared a “revolution in children’s rights,” and how youth in the criminal justice system still have not seen the extent of constitutional protections declared necessary by Gault. Arguing that Gault …

The Law And Policy Of Child Maltreatment, Frank Vandervort

Book Chapters

Each year in the United States some four million children are reported to child protective services and hundreds of thousands of children are confirmed victims of maltreatment. This chapter provides a brief overview of the civil and criminal law’s response to child abuse and neglect. It summarizes the major federal statutes that provide funding to the states to support both civil and criminal law responses to maltreatment. It discusses the division of responsible for responding to child maltreatment between the federal and state governments (federalism). It also provides a summary of the constitutional framework for handling both civil and criminal …

Invisible Article Iii Delinquency: History, Mystery, And Concerns About "Federal Juvenile Courts", Mae C. Quinn, Levi T. Bradford

Journal Articles

This essay is the second in a two-part series focused on our nation’s invisible juvenile justice system—one that operates under the legal radar as part of the U.S. Constitution’s Article III federal district court system. The first publication, Article III Adultification of Kids: History, Mystery, and Troubling Implications of Federal Youth Transfers, examined the little-known practice of prosecuting children as adults in federal courts. This paper will look at the related phenomenon of juvenile delinquency matters that are filed and pursued in our nation’s federal court system. To date, most scholarship evaluating youth prosecution has focused on our country’s juvenile …

America's Hidden Foster Care System, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

In most states, child protection agencies induce parents to transfer physical custody of their children to kinship caregivers by threatening to place the children in foster care and bring them to family court. Both the frequency of these actions (this Article establishes that they occur tens or even hundreds of thousands of times annually) and their impact (they separate parents and children, sometimes permanently) resemble the formal foster care system. But they are hidden from courts, because agencies file no petition alleging abuse or neglect, and hidden from policymakers, because agencies do not generally report these cases.

While informal custody …

Cooperative Federalism And Sijs, Shani M. King, Nicole Silvestri Hall

UF Law Faculty Publications

Recognizing the plight of young immigrants who have suffered abuse, neglect, or abandonment, and cannot be reunited with a parent, Congress has accorded those who qualify Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS). SIJS has created an expedited path for them to permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship. The statutory scheme Congress crafted is unusual in that it requires each applicant to obtain a state court order finding that they meet the requirements for SIJS before the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service decides whether to confer that status on them. The implementation of this scheme has been fraught with difficulty, representing for …

Child Welfare And Covid-19: An Unexpected Opportunity For Systemic Change, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has already wrecked greater havoc in poor neighborhoods of color, where pre-existing conditions exacerbate the disease’s spread. Crowded housing and homelessness, less access to health care and insurance, and underlying health conditions are all factors that worsen the chances of remaining healthy.Workers desperate for income continue to work without sufficient protective measures, moving in and out of these neighborhoods, putting themselves and their families at risk. During periods of greater disruption, tensions are heightened and violence more prevalent. Already some experts are warning of an onslaught of child maltreatment cases, citing earlier examples of spikes in foster …

Unaccompanied Minors, Statutory Interpretation, And Due Process, Shani M. King, Nicole Silvestri Hall

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a novel statutory argument in favor of finding a categorical right to appointed counsel for unaccompanied minors (UMs) using the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)’s fair hearing provision as the basis for this right. We provide the historical framework behind the enshrinement of these two rights and then argue that Congress never intended to preclude appointed counsel. We further propose that the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) grants UMs a positive liberty interest,14 and we use this statutory interest as the basis of an original means of surmounting the Lassiter presumption that only a loss of …