In Re Gault Case Study

It is shocking to know that before 1967 youths in the United States did not have the same rights as adults in court. Before the landmark case In Re Gault individuals underage were not promised the freedoms under the fourteenth amendment. The court system did not take juvenile delinquent cases as seriously. It was almost as if they brushed the delinquents under the rug and put them into a detention center the first chance they got. The Supreme Court came to the conclusion that in the case of In Re Gault the requirements for due process were not met. This has turned into a landmark case because it has altered the way the juvenile delinquent court system runs. A teenager of fifteen years old, Gerald Gault found himself accused of making an obscene telephone call. The victim was a neighbor Mrs. Cook, who reported the incident to police on June 8, 1964. A police officer then located Gault and arrested him on the charges (United States Courts). In an interview with Gualt he describes the way officials handles his case. He claimed that the arresting officer never told the teen what he was being

“The court consistently held that children are entitled to the same due process as adults. With that understood, however, the Court has also consistently held that, from a developmental standpoint, youth are different from adults, which greatly impacts how courts should treat them in a whole host of areas, such as waiver of rights, culpability, and punishment” (National Juvenile Defender Center). This shows that the juvenile delinquent cases before In Re Gault were not highly regulated. The Court believed that handling juveniles needed to be very different from the way the courts handle adult cases. In Re Gault changed that. The case made it a law that juveniles had the rights guaranteed to them by the fourteenth