More Teenagers Face Charges as Adults

Prosecutors in California are gradually charging more teenagers as adults under a tough new juvenile crime initiative even as legal challenges to the measure’s constitutionality mount.

Proposition 21, which was approved by 62% of the voters in March, gave prosecutors instead of judges the right to decide whether juveniles should be charged as adults.

Some county prosecutors have used their new charging authority sparingly, but Los Angeles County is expected to have as much as a 25% jump this year in the number of teenagers charged in adult court.

The constitutionality of the law is under review by an appeals court in San Diego, and the case may reach the California Supreme Court next year.

Because of the litigation, adult trials of teenagers charged under the new law have been put on hold in San Diego. Legal challenges are also pending in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Contra Costa County.

During the campaign for the initiative, juvenile advocacy groups and defense lawyers predicted that thousands of teenagers who could be rehabilitated through the juvenile justice system would instead be sent to adult prisons.

So far, however, while no statewide statistics are available to assess the measure’s impact, prosecutors and defense lawyers in several counties said there has not yet been a strong upward surge in adult trials for teenagers. In part that is because the law is still new and in part it is because juvenile crime is down.

But in San Diego County during the last two or three months, as prosecutors have become more accustomed to the new law, three out of four juvenile cases have been filed in adult court, according to defense and prosecution lawyers.

“It is increasingly the path of choice,” said Joan Stein, chief of the juvenile branch of the San Diego district attorney’s office.

Opponents of the new law are concerned.

“I think you will see an incremental creep toward aggressive policies” under Proposition 21, said Los Angeles Deputy Public Defender Lisa Greer. Any increase in teenagers charged as adults “is a child’s life impacted irrevocably and, in all likelihood, very detrimentally,” Greer said.

Previously, prosecutors could only request that a teenager be tried as an adult. A judge would make the decision after hearing testimony from a defense lawyer and the probation department.

These hearings continue to be held since Proposition 21’s passage when prosecutors are not immediately certain whether the juvenile should be tried as an adult. But prosecutors can bypass hearings in many cases by filing charges directly in adult court under the rules the proposition put in place.

Los Angeles County prosecutors have acted more quickly than district attorneys elsewhere to use their new charging authority. Statistics compiled by the office project that about 25% more teenagers will be tried as adults in Los Angeles County this year because of Proposition 21.

“Our preference is to charge as much as possible as adults because that saves a lot of time,” said George Palmer, head deputy district attorney of the office’s appellate division.

By contrast, Fresno County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Worthington Vogel said Fresno prosecutors have filed only two juvenile cases in adult court since March.

The Fresno district attorney’s office instead continues to seek hearings before judges to determine whether a defendant can be rehabilitated in the juvenile system.

Prosecutors have only 48 hours after an arrest to file charges, and in most cases too little is known about the teenager to make a call on whether he or she should be tried as an adult, Vogel said.

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office has traditionally been aggressive in pushing to try violent juvenile offenders as adults.

“I came to the juvenile system from the adult division in the 1980s, and I was shocked at the murderers and robbers who used firearms and remained in the juvenile system,” said Thomas P. Higgins, head of the juvenile division in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.

The juvenile division “embarked on an effort to get more kids who were violent predators into adult court,” Higgins added. “I am not so sure that approach was shared by other offices throughout the state.”

Before Proposition 21, Los Angeles County judges rejected adult court for teenagers in about 15% to 20% of the cases brought by prosecutors.

Although juvenile crime has declined in Los Angeles and throughout the state, a recent spate of violent gang activity in parts of Los Angeles County may also explain the relatively large proportion of juveniles charged as adults in Los Angeles, the district attorney’s office said.

In Orange County, Proposition 21 has not yet driven up the number of teenage offenders charged as adults, said Jim Tanizaki, Orange County assistant district attorney.

“We use our discretion under Proposition 21 very carefully,” Tanizaki said. The office files charges directly into adult court only in “the real serious juvenile offense, what I call the no-brainers,” he said.

Those cases would have been sent to adult court by judges anyway, he said. “The bottom line is this has saved us time,” he said.

In San Diego County, prosecutors have filed criminal charges against teenagers in adult court in 25 cases since March. The district attorney’s office filed 24 of the cases under the new law and was required to file in adult court in one of the cases.

When juveniles are tried as adults, they are entitled to a preliminary hearing, bail and a trial by a jury. In one San Diego case, two of three teenagers charged as adults in a crime were released on bail while a third, who was kept in the juvenile system, remained in juvenile hall.

“There are advantages to kids being tried as adults,” Stein said.

The juvenile system offers more services to rehabilitate offenders, and sentences are generally lighter.

For a teenager convicted of robbery with a firearm in juvenile court, the medium term is less than three years in the California Youth Authority, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The minimum sentence for an adult is 12 years. All offenders convicted in juvenile court must be released by the age of 25.

Mary Ellen Attridge, the supervising attorney of the Alternate Public Defenders Juvenile Delinquency Division in San Diego, said the public cannot simply assume that judges would have agreed with prosecutors’ charging decisions.

“The fact of the matter is you have to look at the [youths] who can be saved,” Attridge said. “We can’t say 90% would go to adult court anyway. If you can save those 10%, you should.”

Defense lawyers have mounted several challenges to Proposition 21, including a charge that it violates the Constitution’s separation of powers provision because it shifts discretion from the judicial branch to prosecutors.

The lawyers note that in 1996 the California Supreme Court struck down a portion of the three-strikes sentencing law on the grounds that it took away judicial discretion in sentencing. A judge in Sonoma County ruled earlier this year that Proposition 21 also illegally gave prosecutors unwarranted discretion to bypass judges.

In Los Angeles, defense lawyers have challenged grand jury indictments of three juveniles charged in the May killing of a student at a Glendale high school. A judge has tentatively ruled that two of the three juveniles should not have been indicted. The defense contends Proposition 21 is unconstitutional.

The American Civil Liberties Union tried unsuccessfully to get the California Supreme Court to review the measure before it was challenged in lower courts. The ACLU argued that Proposition 21 violates a state constitutional rule that limits initiatives to a single subject.

That suit is being heard in San Francisco Superior Court. The case has since been amended to include the contention that the proposition illegally takes away judicial discretion.

When judges are asked to determine whether a teenager should be tried as an adult, state law requires them to consider several factors. Proposition 21 did not require prosecutors to consider the same factors, although some district attorneys say they do anyway.

“It doesn’t provide any standards for prosecutors to look at when they make that decision,” said Stephen L. Mayer, an attorney who is challenging the measure in the ACLU case on behalf of the League of Women Voters and other groups.