People V. Smith Case Summary

Marcus Dixon was a highly recruited high school football player. His life suddenly took a tragic turn when he was falsely convicted of raping a 15 year old girl. The elements around his false conviction could have been avoided with some reform to the criminal justice courts system. Dixon initially had many charges against him but were narrowed down to statutory rape and aggravated child molestation. There was much racial disparity surrounding the jury on Dixon’s case, in that the county that Dixon committed his “crime” was a predominantly white population. It can be argued that the jury was not a proper representation of his peers. Along with other factual errors surrounding Dixon’s false conviction,

A Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a study in 40 of the nation’s largest urban communities. “It was found that an estimated 7,100 juvenile defendants were charged with felonies in adult criminal court in 1998. Of these 40 county criminal courts, juveniles were 64% more likely than adults to be charged with a violent felony. These juvenile defendants were generally treated as serious offenders, as 52% did not receive pretrial release, 63% were convicted of a felony, and 43% of those convicted received a prison sentence. States have expanded the mechanisms by which juveniles can be charged in criminal courts. In 1998, statutory exclusion was the most common method (42%) used to charge juveniles defendants compared to the more traditional use of juvenile waiver (24%). In the 40 counties in 1998, 62% of the juvenile felony defendants were black, 20% were white, 16% were Hispanic, and almost 2% were of another race” (“Bureau of Justice Statistics”).As time goes on, crime rates of youths

The juvenile justice system has made numerous of ethical issues when managing juvenile offenders. The issue with the juvenile justice system is the laws and rules that govern it. It has led to years of controversial debate over the ethical dilemmas of the juvenile corrections system, and how they work with youth offenders. The number of minors entering the juvenile justice system is increasing every month. The reasons why the juvenile justice system faces ethical dilemmas is important and needs to be addressed: (1) a vast proportion of juveniles are being tried and prosecuted as adults; (2) the psychological maturation of the juvenile to fully comprehend the justice system; and (3) the factors that contribute to minorities being adjudicated in the juvenile justice system are more likely than White offenders. These three ethical issues that are rising in the juvenile justice system will be further examined.

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.

The Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention and Protection Act (JJDPA) was established in 1974 and was the first federal law that dealt comprehensively with juvenile delinquency to improve the juvenile justice system and support state and local efforts at delinquency prevention. This paper will assess the JJDPA and summarize its purpose and implementation and enforcement. Next, there will be a discussion of the historical context of the policy; followed by a focus of the latent consequences. Finally there will be a vignette as to how this Act has affected a person or family as well as personal reflection toward the policy.

There were five factors introduced with Miller’s case by the Supreme Court. The five characteristics or consequences of juveniles’ immaturity relevant for mitigation of

The Supreme Court is a part of the judicial branch of the United States government. They decide criminal and civil appeal cases that involve federal law. They also make sure that a law that congress or the president proposed is constitutional. There are nine Supreme Court judges. They have made decisions on racial segregation issues all the way to woman’s rights, including voting laws. One case in particular, McCleskey v. Kemp, was decided in The Supreme Court. Mccleskey v. Kemp was wrongly decided by the Georgia courts and then also by The Supreme Court, in which they decided that it did not violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.

Brock Allen Turner was a nineteen-year-old star athlete, a freshmen swimmer at Stanford University who was admitted in the fall of 2014 on a swimming scholarship. On January 17, 2015, he attended a party at Kappa Alpha fraternity house where he met the victim, twenty-year-old women who later identified as Emily Doe, her sister and their friends. Turner and the victim both consumed alcohol at the party. Shortly after the midnight of January 18, 2015, Tuner and the victim left the party and the victim was split up from her friends. The victim made a couple unintelligible phone calls from 11:54p.m to 12:28 a.m with her friends, then later on passed out behind a nearby dumpster outside the fraternity

This statute reiterates that youth court records are to remain confidential, under normal circumstances, but it provides 20 exceptions to this requirement (Miss. Code, 1972). This statute requires that the youth court issue a court order, expressing what records, and to whom they may be disseminated to. Examples of times when these youth court records may be released are if they are being released to another youth court judge, or staff, the court deciding a child custody issue, the Department of Human Services, or any other judge, or staff of any court, which has requested the records. Another reason such juvenile records may be released is if the judge of circuit, or county courts, and presentence investigators, require such records for sentencing purposes, after a person has been convicted of another crime pursuant to Section 47-7-9 (Miss. Code, 1972). What this means is that juvenile adjudications can be used for sentencing considerations, for new convictions, even after said records have been sealed. Other exceptions to the sealing of youth court records include controlled substance violations, implied consent violations, and violations of sexual abuse statutes. The important thing to be taken away from this statute is that juvenile court adjudication records may be used in presentence investigations of any person who has been convicted of a

Childress, S. (2016, June 2). More States Consider Raising the Age for Juvenile Crime. Retrieved from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/more-states-consider-raising-the-age-for-juvenile-crime/

“He found that youths were likely to spend considerably more time in adult correctional facilities than juveniles that were sent to state juvenile facilities,” (Krisberg 176). Juvenile offenders has become an excelling issue since the beginning of the first juvenile institutions in the 19th century (Shoemaker 5). The issue then arises, should juvenile offenders be tried as children or adults. This is an important issue that can impact many children and society as a whole, therefore this issue should be taken wisely.

In today’s world there are countless crimes committed every single day. “In 2015, there were 1.42 million total arrests, at a rate of 3,641 arrests per 100,000 residents” (State of California, Department of Justice). Grown adults are not the only people being arrested every year, there are also juveniles, children, being arrested every day. One topic of controversy today is whether or not juveniles who commit these crimes should be tried as adults in criminal court. There are many differences between the justice system for adults and the justice system for juveniles. If a juvenile is defined as a person under the age of eighteen can we justify trying them in as an adult? Is convicting juveniles as adults a better solution?

Siegel, L. &. (1988). Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Practice and Law (3rd ed.). United States of America: West Publishing Company.

On March 20, 2012, during the oral argument in Miller v. Alabama, Associate Justice Samuel Alito pressed the petitioner's counsel Bryan Stevenson to explain his contention that state legislators did not understand the sentencing consequences of the juvenile transfer laws that they had passed during the 1990s.1These laws facilitated the transfer of children's cases from juvenile court into an adult criminal justice system that required mandatory sentences, such as life without the possibility of parole, for many offenses.2The Supreme Court had consolidated the cases of Kuntrell Jackson, an African American teenager, who had been convicted of capital murder in Arkansas, and Evan Miller, a white teenager who had been convicted of murder in an arson case in Alabama. Kuntrell and Evan had both been 14 years old at the time of their crimes, and in both cases, the minimum and maximum sentences were exactly the same: life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). The prosecutor in Miller's case had argued that the teenager deserved to die for his crime but that the Supreme Court had abolished the juvenile death penalty in 2005. Five years later, the high court banned LWOP sentences for juveniles convicted of nonhomicidal offenses. Now Stevenson, the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, urged the justices to use the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments to eliminate all mandatory

Prior to 1899 in the United States, children who committed a criminal offense were tried and punished as adults. Children were being institutionalized with adult criminals where they were picking up negative influences preparing them for a life of crime. Progressive and social change demanded that children be protected and educated instead and therefore a separate court system for juveniles was subsequently established to address this problem. It has since being argued that juvenile courts have abandoned their role to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents and should be abolished.