Teenagers in the Court System

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Jan Hoffman’s post

What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them.

Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements.

These were among the observations in a recent study of 57 videotaped interrogations of teenagers, ages 13 to 17, from 17 police departments around the country. The research, published in Law and Human Behavior, adds to accumulating evidence that teenagers are psychologically vulnerable at the gateway to the criminal justice system. Youths, some researchers say, merit special protections.

reminded me of a personal experience when I sat on a jury.

At a cognitive level, the video of the detective and the defendant showed an incriminating confession, obtained by the book, without threats, intimidation, or promises. At an emotional level, it showed a teenage boy, in an awful mess, with no adult there to help him. He was polite, and almost endearing. The majority of jurors had children, and the main effect of the video was to trigger our Parent Reflex. In our particular courtroom drama, the role that many of us chose was that of the defendant’s Surrogate Parents.

It was a traumatic experience, and we let a guilty young person off. Go back and read my whole essay.

4 thoughts on “Teenagers in the Court System”

  2. Cry me a river. The only caveat I would offer depends on whether or not the teen is being charged at an adult, and that usually only happens when the crime is particularly violent- rapes, attempted murder, and murder, at which point I again am unsympathetic. If one’s worry is coerced and false confessions/incrimination, then why the selective sympathy for teenagers?

  3. In Lafler v. Cooper, Scalia once called this instinctive attitude the ‘sporting chance’ theory.

    In the United States, we have plea bargaining a-plenty, but until today it has been regarded as a necessary evil. It presents grave risks of prosecutorial overcharging that effectively compels an innocent defendant to avoid massive risk by pleading guilty to a lesser offense; and for guilty defendants it often—perhaps usually—results in a sentence well below what the law prescribes for the actual crime. But even so, we accept plea bargaining because many believe that without it our long and expensive process of criminal trial could not sustain the burden imposed on it, and our system of criminal justice would grind to a halt …

    Today, however, the Supreme Court of the United States elevates plea bargaining from a necessary evil to a constitutional entitlement. It is no longer a somewhat embarrassing adjunct to our criminal justice system; rather, as the Court announces in the companion case to this one, “ ‘it is the criminal justice system.’ ” … Thus, even though there is no doubt that the respondent here is guilty of the offense with which he was charged; even though he has received the exorbitant gold standard of American justice—a full-dress criminal trial with its innumerable constitutional and statutory limitations upon the evidence that the prosecution can bring forward, and (in Michigan as in most States) the requirement of a unanimous guilty verdict by impartial jurors; the Court says that his conviction is invalid because he was deprived of his constitutional entitlement to plea-bargain.

    I am less saddened by the outcome of this case than I am by what it says about this Court’s attitude toward criminal justice. <em<The Court today embraces the sporting-chance theory of criminal law, in which the State functions like a conscientious casino-operator, giving each player a fair chance to beat the house, that is, to serve less time than the law says he deserves [emphasis added -H]. And when a player is excluded from the tables, his constitutional rights have been violated. I do not subscribe to that theory. No one should, least of all the Justices of the Supreme Court.

    It seems to me that there is some kind of Peltzman effect or risk-compensation recalibration in which, regardless of guilt or justice or social consequences, whenever we perceive that law-enforcement authorities have too much of an advantage over the accused and too easy a time obtaining a conviction, we feel the need to throw some extra burdensome obstacles in their path, or restack the deck more in favor of a defendant, but of course always under the cover of doing so in the name of some Constitutional right.

    The effect of this seems to keep the total rate of trials or convictions more or less stable, even when technology and forensic evidence should be acting as force multipliers and increasing the socially optimal number of prosecutions. Prosecutors don’t get to exploit these economies, and are always faced with the same severe resource constraint and have to make difficult discretionary decisions on who are the worst of the worst, and who can be dismissed with a relatively minor punishment.

    The question of where this emotional impulse (or perhaps social emergent phenomenon) comes from is quite interesting. My speculation is that the answer lies in the social coordination game-theory-solving instincts from evolutionary psychology, and the instinct to detect and avoid potential political domination. I wonder what Hanson would say.

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