Crucial Role for California Judges

No question, the crime was horrific. Eight juveniles from an affluent San Diego neighborhood are charged with chasing down five Mexican farm workers living in a makeshift camp in a desolate canyon, pummeling them with fists and pipes and berating them with ethnic slurs. Most of the victims were in their 60s. Three were shot with pellet guns; one was robbed.

No question, these suspects, from 14 to 17 years old, deserve harsh legal punishment for this unprovoked and cowardly attack if they are found guilty. But who decides how harsh?

Not prosecutors alone, a San Diego appeals court held Wednesday, dealing a severe blow to Proposition 21, which voters passed last March. The appeals court decision underscores the value of judicial discretion, which has been steadily diminished by the three-strikes law, mandatory sentences and even last year’s Proposition 36, which mandated treatment, not jail, for first-time drug offenders.

Proposition 21 gave prosecutors the unilateral power to decide whether teenagers 14 and older should face adult penalties for many serious charges. With its passage, California joined more than 40 other states that have made it easier to try juveniles as adults. Before Proposition 21, prosecutors had to obtain the approval of a judge before trying a juvenile as an adult.

In Wednesday’s decision, a three-member panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego held that the measure’s key provision violates state and federal separation-of-powers doctrines because it hands judicial power to prosecutors.

Proposition 21 is also bad policy. Young offenders charged with certain kinds of murders and sex crimes can already be tried as adults. In some cases, prosecutors and judges ought to throw the book at them. But to let prosecutors alone decide whether to bring adult charges and possibly adult sentences against children as young as 14 with virtually no checks and balances opens the door to abuses just as it nearly closes the door on any chance for those defendants to straighten up.

Rehabilitation has a bad name these days, and some youngsters do commit heinous crimes. Yet to blindly push more teenagers into hard time with career criminals almost guarantees that we will see more thugs on the streets in the end. That’s why judges, who must balance the interests of all parties, need to be involved in deciding how to try a juvenile.

As the first appellate ruling interpreting Proposition 21, Wednesday’s decision is binding on trial courts statewide, affecting thousands of young offenders in coming years and 300 to 400 teenagers already convicted under the measure or now being tried.

The California Supreme Court will surely have the last word, probably by hearing similar challenges now working their way through the courts. The high court justices, who in 1996 invalidated similarly absolute prosecutorial authority in charging three-strikes cases, are likely to be in tune with their brethren in San Diego. The juvenile defendants in the San Diego case, meanwhile, still face charges of robbery, assault, hate crimes and elder abuse. Some may even be tried as adults, but now that decision will be made, rightly, in consultation with a judge.