Juvenile Law Commons^™

"Sweet Childish Days": Using Developmental Psychology Research In Evaluating The Admissibility Of Out-Of-Court Statements By Young Children, Lynn Mclain

All Faculty Scholarship

A three-year-old child, while being bathed by her babysitter, innocently mentions that her “pee-pee” hurts. When the babysitter asks the child how she hurt it, she says, “Uncle Ernie (her mother’s boyfriend) told me not to tell.” A subsequent medical examination reveals that the child has gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease.

By the time of trial, the child is four and-a-half-years old. When questioned by the trial judge, she cannot explain to the judge’s satisfaction, “the difference between the truth and a lie.” Moreover, she has no long term memory of the incident. The judge rules the child incompetent to …

What’S Wrong With Victims’ Rights In Juvenile Court?: Retributive V. Rehabilitative Systems Of Justice, Kristin N. Henning

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While scholars have written extensively about the victims’ rights movement in capital and criminal cases, there has been very little discussion about the intersection of victims’ rights and the juvenile justice system. Statutes that allow victims to attend juvenile hearings and present oral and written impact statements have shifted the juvenile court’s priorities and altered the way judges think about young offenders. While judges were once primarily concerned with the best interests of the delinquent child, victims’ rights legislation now requires juvenile courts to balance the rehabilitative needs of the child with other competing interests such as accountability to the …

Introduction: The Challenge Of Lionel Tate, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Legal reforms over the past generation have transformed juvenile crime regulation from a system that viewed most youth crime as the product of immaturity into one that is ready to hold many youths to the standard of accountability imposed on adults. Supporters of these reforms argue that they are simply a response to the inability of the traditional juvenile court to deal adequately with violent youth crime, but the legal changes that have transformed the system have often been undertaken in an atmosphere of moral panic, with little deliberation about consequences and costs.

In this book we argue that a …

Post-Crawford: Time To Liberalize The Substantive Admissibility Of A Testifying Witness's Prior Consistent Statements, Lynn Mclain

All Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court's 1995 decision in Tome v. United States has read Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(1)(B) to prevent the prosecution's offering a child abuse victim's prior consistent statements as substantive evidence. As a result of that decision, the statements will also be inadmissible even for the limited purpose of helping to evaluate the credibility of a child, if there is a serious risk that the out-of-court statements would be used on the issue of guilt or innocence.

Moreover, after the Court's March 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington, which redesigned the landscape of Confrontation Clause analysis, other …

On Statutory Rape, Strict Liability, And The Public Welfare Offense Model, Catherine L. Carpenter

American University Law Review

Statutory Rape. At the center of a long-standing debate on whether its commission should require proof of a criminal mens rea, the prosecution of statutory rape offers a revealing look at the struggle to demarcate the parameters of the public welfare offense doctrine. Specifically, with respect to statutory rape, disagreement is deep and entrenched on whether statutory rape should be categorized as a public welfare offense, which would render irrelevant defendant's lack of knowledge of the victim's age. And despite wholesale revamping of state statutory rape laws on issues of age, gender, and potential grading and punishment, the debate on …

Blaming Youth, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In March of 2001, a fourteen-year-old Florida boy named Lionel Tate was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing six-year-old Tiffany Eunick during a wrestling match that took place when Lionel was twelve years old. Lionel was convicted of first degree murder on the ground that the killing was the result of aggravated child abuse, a crime that contemplates injury of a child by an adult caretaker. His conviction and sentence have prompted much debate and discussion – about his case and, more generally, about the criminal punishment of young offenders. Although the verdict and Lionel's sentence received …

A Prevention Model Of Juvenile Justice: The Promise Of Kansas V. Hendricks For Children, Christopher Slobogin, Mark R. Fondacaro, Jennifer L. Woolard

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The traditional juvenile court, focused on rehabilitation and "childsaving," was premised primarily on a parens patriae notion of State power. " Because of juveniles' immaturity and greater treatability, this theory posited, the State could forego the substantive and procedural requirements associated with the adult system of criminal punishment. As an historical and conceptual matter, however, the parens patriae power justifies intervention only for the good of the subject, not for society as a whole. " From the outset, then, the image of the juvenile delinquency system as a manifestation of the State acting as "parent" was an implausible one. This …

Legal Images Of Motherhood: Conflicting Definitions From Welfare "Reform," Family And Criminal Law, Jane C. Murphy

All Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article explores the traditional idealized view of motherhood that child placement statutes and court decisions reflect. These laws include statutes and case law in custody disputes between parents and in child protection proceedings under civil and criminal laws where the dispute is between the parent and the state. Part II contrasts the legal construct of motherhood that child placement laws embody with the legal image of mothers in child support and welfare law.

Part III examines the impact of these conflicting images of motherhood on a particular group of mothers -- battered women. Battered women illuminate …

The Age Of Criminal Responsibility In An Era Of Violence: Has Great Britain Set A New International Standard?, Stephanie J. Millet

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

With the alarming rise of juvenile crime and violence during the past decade, policymakers across the international community have struggled to develop effective juvenile criminal justice systems apart from the existing systems tailored to adults. The wide variations in methods and philosophies utilized in different states indicate that there is no consensus on the proper treatment of young offenders. Using the recent Bulger case as a focus, this Note examines two competing paradigms of juvenile justice found within the British juvenile justice system, with particular emphasis on the age of criminal responsibility. After discussing recent developments in Great Britain's juvenile …

The Court-Ordered Predisposition Evaluation Under Washington's Juvenile Justice Act: A Violation Of The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination?—Wash. Rev. Code § 13.40, Judith H. Ramseyer

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment analyzes the significance of the principles animating the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination by first looking at the purposes of Washington’s Juvenile Justice Act; second, by examining the status of the privilege against self-incrimination during sentencing; and third, by applying the values protected by the privilege to the use of predisposition psychological evaluations in Washington juvenile courts.

Note: Constitutional Chellanges To New York's Youthful Offender Statute, John M. Tyd

Fordham Urban Law Journal

New York's Youthful Offender Statute has been described as "humane and progressive legislation intended for the benefit of a youth who makes his first mistake and that he should not be branded as a criminal therefor..." In keeping with this philosophy, the statute provides a system whereby a youth (i.e., an individual between the ages of sixteen and eighteen) can avoid the serious consequences which result from being convicted of a crime. Upon determination that youthful offender status should be granted, the conviction is vacated and replaced with a youthful offender finding. Prior to 1975, those youths indicted for crimes …

Criminal Law--Juvenile Delinquency--Contributing Survives Constitutional Attack: Confusion Or Certainty, Michael Frank Pezzulli

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privacy Versus Parens Patriae The Role Of Police Records In The Sentencing And Surveillance Of Juveniles, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to examine juvenile record systems maintained by police authorities. A primary thesis is that current procedures governing the creation and dissemination of such records are so severely misguided by underlying parens patriae concepts that they often result in the purposeless stigmatization of a far greater range of youths than the juvenile justice system has any justification in attempting to deal with. Indeed, increasing evidence suggests that the net effect of such record keeping is to ensure that many of the subject juveniles will mature into confirmed delinquents.

A Re-Evaluation Of The Privilege Against Adverse Spousal Testimony In The Light Of Its Purpose, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent development in American federal criminal evidence law to be examined and compared with English law in this paper, is a new evolutionary turn taken by the husband-wife privilege against adverse spousal testimony, manifest in the Supreme Court decision of Wyatt v. United States. The House of Lords, in Rumping v. D.P.P., just decided, suggests that the English spousal privileges might be susceptible of similar development.