Juvenile Justice

Once again, police are vilifying kids.

The evening of August 6th, 2004, 16-year old Cyntoia Brown shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville resident who picked her up for sex. It was an act of self defense, she explained to police later; after Allen took her to his house, he showed Cyntoia multiple guns, including shotguns and rifles. Later in bed, as she described in court, he grabbed her violently by the genitals, his demeanor became threatening and, fearing for her life, she took a gun out of her purse and shot him.

State law makes it easier to throw Brown away than consider traumas youth face and offer them hope of rehabilitation.

On Labor Day 2017, Giovanni Jerry Reid of Philadelphia was released from Graterford Prison in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. He had served 26 years of a life sentence without possibility of parole, imposed when he was only 16 years old. On that warm, sunny morning, as he took his very first steps as a free adult, […]

Note: This first appeared in our daily In Justice Today newsletter. To get stories like these in your inbox every day, you can sign up here. Our focus today is on juvenile life without parole sentences. Yesterday, California became the 20th state to ban JLWOP. Washington could become the next state to eliminate JLWOP, as the question of […]

Memphis critic says Juvenile Court Judge’s resistance to reforms has ‘emasculated’ Department of Justice

(This article is cross-posted from the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange blog) When I was 17, I accepted a plea agreement and 25-year prison sentence to avoid the likelihood of spending the rest of my life in prison. I had been involved in the death of another person. Prosecutors initially charged me with first-degree murder and aggravated robbery […]

The decision was unanimous.

A district attorney wants to solve crime by breaking up families.

The policy making body of the American Bar Association has approved multiple resolutions calling for a major reform of bail, an end to locking juveniles up in solitary confinement, and an end to mandatory minimum sentences. The resolutions put the ABA, a voluntary professional association with over 400,000 members, in line with what many criminal justice reform […]

71-year-old Henry Montgomery has been in prison for over 50 years for his role in the shooting death of East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy Charles Hurt. But he now has a chance to see the free world. The petitioner in the U.S. Supreme Court case Montgomery v. Louisiana, which gave hope to thousands of people who thought they […]

If someone commits a crime days after turning 18, should he be treated like an adult or a child? In two recent cases — Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana — the U.S. Supreme Court held that life-without-parole should be reserved for the rare kid (defined as someone under 18) “whose crime reflects irreparable corruption,” citing the ability of youth […]

The office of Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian is fighting to keep a man locked up in prison even though an appellate court has ordered a new hearing in his case to determine whether he should have been tried as a juvenile. Max Wade, now 22, was sentenced in 2014 to 21 years to life imprisonment […]

A Kentucky judge has ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional for defendants who committed a murder before they turned 21 years of old. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for anyone who committed murder when they were under the age of 18. Fayette Circuit Court […]

A 22-year-old Baton Rouge man sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when he was a juvenile will now have a chance to get out of prison after the Louisiana Supreme Court held that his sentence is unconstitutional. Thayer Green was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after he was arrested […]

A 22-year-old Baton Rouge man sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when he was a juvenile will now have a chance to get out of prison after the Louisiana Supreme Court held that his sentence is unconstitutional. Thayer Green was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after he was arrested […]

Confronting a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Marion County Attorney Ed Bull will not file criminal charges against a 14-year-old girl for “sexting.” Photos of the girl were acquired and printed by male students at her high school. Last year, the Iowa prosecutor launched an investigation of the high school student, Nancy Doe, for […]

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Michael O’Malley attempted to try a 15-year-old boy accused of murder as an adult. The child was accused of shooting 16-year-old Alexander Mullins in an abandoned building in Cleveland’s Slavic Village. O’Malley’s effort to try the child in adult court was rejected by Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Judge Alison Floyd, who found that the […]

That’s what officers told then 17-year-old Gerome Moore when they interrogated him following the 2015 shooting of Carolyn Temple. Moore ultimately confessed to driving the getaway car for two friends who robbed and shot Temple in her boyfriend’s driveway; she died a week later from the gunshot wound.