Word: courts
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...detention center, PA Child Care, have not yet been charged. (The owner, Greg Zappala, says he didn't know anything improper was going on, while a former co-owner claims he was a victim of extortion by the judges.) What's more, many prosecutors, public defenders and other court officials apparently turned a blind eye to the abuses, shocking parents who had expected a fine or probation and instead watched their children be dragged off into custody. When the mother of the 14-year-old arrested for stealing the loose change asked to hire an attorney, she was told...
...summer, after reviewing a large swath of research literature, the Department of Justice concluded that "to best achieve reduction in recidivism, the overall number of juvenile offenders transferred to the criminal-justice system should be minimized." That came three years after the U.S. stopped executing minors, following a Supreme Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that was largely based on new brain research showing that the full development of the frontal lobe, where rational judgments are made, does not occur until the early- to mid-20s. At the state level, Missouri is leading the country by phasing out its large juvenile...
...Pennsylvania scandal showed, keeping kids out of institutions requires at the very least zealous legal representation. The Supreme Court extended the right to legal counsel to juveniles in 1967. But in practice the requirement still goes largely unfulfilled, in part because in some jurisdictions, it does not apply to the initial detention hearings at which judges decide whether the minor can stay at home or must be held by authorities. In addition, the confidentiality measures in place to protect the identities of minors can sometimes prevent much needed transparency...
...argue that they were in a position where they should have known of the problem but chose not to speak out. Instead, it took the work of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to uncover the abuses. After discovering that more than 50% of kids in Luzerne County Juvenile Court had been without legal counsel, the organization in April 2008 petitioned the Pennsylvania supreme court to step in. (See the top 10 crime stories...
...Even then, there was no action taken initially; eight months elapsed before the court declined to act, without explanation, even though the application was supported by the state's attorney general. But the day after federal charges were leveled against the two judges - the result of a long-running probe into links between the court and the youth-detention centers - the state supreme court reversed itself and appointed someone to clean up the mess...