Topic 112: Juvenile Court
(revised 11/97)

For more than a century, the public has generally accepted the principle that children who break the law should be treated differently from adult criminals. Nevertheless, this concept continues to be controversial.

One reason for the controversy is that no one has ever devised a foolproof way to deal with kids who break the law. Generally, children are more likely to reform their ways than adult criminals. So juvenile courts continue trying new strategies to reach them. These strategies may be punitive in some respects but they are primarily designed to rehabilitate.

For example, when a youth is ordered to earn money to make restitution to the victim of his crime, the intent is not to punish the youth or to make the victim whole but to encourage the youth to take responsibility for his/her actions.

The strategies work with some children but don't with others. Juvenile officers and judges must make better guesses as to strategies, based on the information available to them. For this reason, most states give juvenile courts broad powers and discretion in dealing with juvenile delinquents, including several varieties of probation and institutional placement.

The goal is that the punishment plan fits the child, even if the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

Some kids, of course, are too hardened to change or too dangerous to risk attempting rehabilitation in a juvenile treatment setting. In those cases, all states provide some way for dealing with children as adults in criminal court. In Missouri that way is called a certification or waiver of jurisdiction proceeding.

Missouri treats a juvenile as an adult only after an investigation into the juvenile's background and a full hearing of the certification issues. At such a hearing the juvenile has rights to be represented by a lawyer and to present and oppose evidence as to whether he should be treated as an adult.

Juveniles who remain under the juvenile court's authority also are constitutionally entitled to the help of a lawyer if they are charged with breaking the law, to written notice of the charge and to a trial where the charge must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Juveniles have no constitutional right to a jury trial in a juvenile court, although some states, other than Missouri, have laws that provide them this right.

Most states make juvenile court proceedings confidential, protecting children from having the misdeeds of their youth held against them throughout their lives. These courts have effectively performed their task when such children are reformed into productive adult members of society.