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Rethinking Family-Court Prosecutors: Elected And Agency Prosecutors And Prosecutorial Discretion In Juvenile Delinquency And Child Protection Cases, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
Rethinking Family-Court Prosecutors: Elected And Agency Prosecutors And Prosecutorial Discretion In Juvenile Delinquency And Child Protection Cases, Joshua Gupta-Kagan
Faculty Scholarship
Like criminal prosecutors, family-court prosecutors have immense power. Determining which cases to prosecute and which to divert or dismiss goes to the heart of the delinquency system’s balance between punishment and rehabilitation of children and the child protection system’s spectrum of family interventions. For instance, the 1990s shift to prosecute (rather than dismiss or divert) about 10 percent more delinquency cases annually is as significant a development as any other. Yet scholars have not examined the legal structures for these charging decisions or family-court prosecutors’ authority in much depth.
This Article shows how family-court prosecutors’ roles have never been fully …