The Young Guns of Alabama

Teenage defendants wearing sky-blue jail jumpsuits file into an Alabama juvenile courtroom once a week for a session unique in American jurisprudence. The first-time offenders are a mix of whites and blacks, city and suburban kids who all share identical rap sheets: They have been caught carrying guns.

They sit in silence, awaiting the start of “gun court,” an experiment in hard justice and tough love that has taken root in conservative Birmingham--and is attracting attention as a prototype for other cities trying to counter teen gun use.

Gun court takes on only first-time juvenile weapons cases. Its judges offer understanding, but little mercy. Verdicts are “swift, sure and certain,” says Jefferson County Judge Sandra Ross Storm, the family court administrator who created the gun court six years ago.

Young offenders are meted out a regimen of boot camp stints, curfews, drug tests and, sometimes, months-long turns in detention. They and their parents also are ordered to sit through an array of counseling sessions and classes aimed at changing attitudes about firearms--a daring, socially conscious tack in a Southern town ardent about gun rights.

The Birmingham gun court’s focus on teenagers and its blend of law-and-order severity and reformist zeal make it the most promising in a recent wave of judicial initiatives targeted at gun crimes. Gun courts are cousins to the drug court movement that sprouted in hundreds of U.S. cities during the 1990s. But the limited number of gun courts--there are fewer than a dozen now operating--demonstrates a lingering reluctance by judges to wade into the volatile debate concerning the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

“There are some [ideological] battle lines that court systems don’t want to cross,” said David B. Rottman--associate director of research for the National Center for State Courts, a nonpartisan Virginia-based group. “But they are becoming more and more willing to target particular offenders with community-based courts.”

Gun courts that opened in Providence, R.I., in 1994 and in Baltimore last year have a strong prosecutorial bent--speeding up dockets and toughening sentences for adults charged with weapons felonies. Other courts follow the activist lead of a recently opened Detroit gun court that steers adult offenders into character-building classes.

In Birmingham, Storm’s court borrows from both camps. That has helped the program avoid the partisan fury that usually erupts over gun issues. When the judge, a lifelong Republican, pressed community leaders to back her idea six years ago, “we knew we needed to change behavior,” she said. “Toughening up the prosecution of a law alone wasn’t going to do it.”

Alabama gun groups grudgingly have accepted her court because of its hard-nosed verdicts. “If a kid gets stopped and he’s got an illegal weapon, good--throw the book at him,” said Archie Phillips, a taxidermist and lifetime National Rifle Assn. member who is Birmingham’s top gun rights proponent.

The Alabama court also became a pet program of outgoing Atty. Gen. Janet Reno. Eager for tools to blunt youth gun crimes in the wake of Colorado’s 1999 Columbine High School massacre, Reno started touting Storm’s approach. In the Clinton administration’s waning months, the Justice Department--which already listed the court as one of the nation’s 10 most promising crime reduction programs--has been studying it as a possible blueprint for other communities.

“This administration has tried to link tough enforcement with effective intervention,” said Assistant Deputy Atty. Gen. Bea Witzleben. “And we think Birmingham is a good model of that.” The gun court’s careful calibration between extremes led Witzleben to voice hope that it would remain a model for “any new administration.”

David Shepard--an analyst at Cosmos Inc., a research firm looking at the Alabama program for the Justice Department--said that youths who have gone through the process are less likely to be arrested again for gun crimes.

According to a recently completed study, Shepard said, gun court participants have a recidivism rate around 20%--compared with teens outside that process, whose gun rearrest rate hovers in the 40% range.

“That’s pretty significant,” Shepard said. “It appears that once they’ve gone through the gun court program, they’d prefer not to go through the justice system again.”

One recent Monday, an attorney for a boy pleading “true”--juvenile court parlance for “guilty”--to a gun charge approached Judge Vincent J. Shellechi Jr. in his courtroom in Bessemer, a Birmingham suburb. The lawyer asked that his client be placed on electronic monitoring instead of being held in detention for 10 more days before being sent off to boot camp.

The teenage defendant, a plump youth with acne scars, swiveled in his chair, gaping at the scene around him. He also had been charged with robbery for illegally entering a house armed with a shotgun and a baseball bat. But because he was a first-timer, the judge dropped that issue and sentenced him only on the gun charge.

“He doesn’t qualify,” the judge said with the barest trace of sympathy. “This is a gun court case.”

Shellechi stared gloomily at the boy. “I understand you plan to plead true. All right, we’re going to commit you to the Department of Youth Services. No. 1, you’ll go through our gun court classes. Two, you’ll go to a boot camp. Is that clear?”

The boy’s mumble was inaudible, but his defeated slouch was answer enough.

Worries by Civil Libertarians

Gun court’s thrust is to get first-time teenage defendants to quickly plead guilty and then send them through its tough probation process “so we don’t ever see them again,” Storm said.

But the court’s unsubtle pressure worries some civil libertarians. Under court rules, youths who opt to go to trial remain in detention until their cases are called. The delay is supposed to last no longer than 10 days. But when gun cases back up, it can stretch to two or three weeks, Legal Aid lawyer Burt Young said.

“For a teenager, that’s an eternity,” he said. Some rush to plead guilty, Young said, even when they might prefer to go to trial. The result, he said, is that more than half of the gun court’s defendants quickly plead true.

“My concern is that kids are being held in detention as a matter of policy,” Young said.

The pressure on young gun suspects is legal under Alabama’s juvenile system, Storm insists. Judges “have such wide discretion. The beauty is we were able to shape the court the way we wanted to.”

Once offenders plead guilty, they are sent to a monthlong boot camp in Montgomery, Ala. On their return, they are kept under virtual house arrest during a probation period that can last as long as six months. There are frequent drug tests. Probation officers show up for spot checks. Offenders and their parents take 10 weeks of classes on family issues and gun safety.

The first group of parents who showed up for class in 1994 were not keen on the idea. Some wore T-shirts that showed Storm’s face under a target.

“They came around,” Storm laughed.

At one recent parenting class, Judge Andra Sparks asked 20 adults crowded into his courtroom: “How many y’all here because you want to be here?” Not a single hand was raised.

“How many here because you have to be here?” Twenty hands shot up.

Darlene Taylor, whose 16-year-old son pleaded guilty last fall to carrying a 9-millimeter pistol, felt much the same way when she showed up for her first class.

“Nobody wanted to be there,” she said, remembering fellow parents’ vacant stares and rolling eyes. But in a few weeks, she found herself agreeing with the instructors’ advice that families lock away their firearms and enforce gun safety.

When Taylor and her son joined a group of gun court parents on a mandatory field trip to the Jefferson County morgue, she noticed her boy’s widening eyes. “This is bad,” he whispered.

“That’s why I want to know where you are at night,” Taylor recalled saying. “That could be you.”

Birmingham’s gun court was born out of the grim tableau on view in the coroner’s lab.

In the early ‘90s, gang violence had spiraled out of control. The city was awash in crack cocaine. By 1994, it ranked fifth in the nation in youth murders. That year, 25 teens were shot to death--many gunned down by underage killers.

Most victims were familiar faces in Storm’s juvenile courtroom. At the start of each week, she would flip through her caseload and find bench notes from her law clerk, Jeff McGee. “This case closed,” they read, “because child is deceased.”

“We had kids coming in in wheelchairs, kids with brain damage,” said Storm, 54, who runs a court system of 130 employees out of an office decorated with Raggedy Ann dolls.

Then, on a drive to a conference in Montgomery, McGee mentioned a newspaper article he had read about Providence’s gun court. That same year, spurred on by a fatal shooting of a Providence policeman, officials in the Rhode Island capital had turned to a specialized gun court docket to streamline felony weapons cases.

Storm was intrigued--particularly when McGee told her that NRA officials in Providence had backed the experiment. In January 1995, Storm called her own informal meeting to develop a gun court. She sat down with prosecutors and Legal Aid lawyers, defense attorneys and police, social service providers and NRA point man Phillips.

The experiment Storm proposed was more comprehensive than Providence’s segregated gun docket and was aimed strictly at the young. Storm wanted Birmingham’s model to have “swift consequences for violent behavior” and “an education component to change that behavior.”

Alabama already had a boot camp system in place--but Storm told those in her meetings that “there had to be follow-up, or the camps were useless.” And she wanted parents as well as teens to attend classes “so they understood they were part of the problem. We didn’t want to tell them that keeping guns was bad. But we needed to educate them and their kids about what their responsibilities were.”

Phillips said he left the first meeting worried about the “gray areas” Storm’s court might raise. Still, he trusted the judge--who has carried a handgun ever since she headed off to college in Florida in the late 1960s.

Ever since gun court opened in April 1995, he has kept quiet. He monitors its progress from afar but, Phillips admits, “Judge Storm seems to know what she’s doing.”

Other gun rights leaders are torn over the idea of gun courts. While some are drawn to the toughened enforcement model practiced in Providence and Baltimore, they rule out supporting more socially activist courts such as the model pioneered by Detroit District Judge Willie Lipscombe--a strong advocate of classes warning about the toll of using firearms.

What unites the varying gun court models, says the National Center for State Courts’ Rottman, is “the presence of an activist judge or an activist judicial system willing to experiment to deal with gun crimes.”

The growth of drug courts in more than 430 American communities in the 1990s has helped sensitize judges toward trying a similar tack with gun cases.

It is a new mode of judicial activism that so far has provoked little criticism from either the left or the right, Rottman noted.

One of the few voices urging caution is Denver District Court Judge Morris B. Hoffman, who penned an article in the North Carolina Law Review in June criticizing the legal system’s growing dependence on drug courts. Hoffman complained that, by taking an activist role against a social problem, judges risk losing their neutrality--and upset the balance of their court’s advocacy system.

“They are compromising deep-seated legal values,” Hoffman wrote, “including the doctrine of separation of powers, the idea that truth is best discovered in the fires of advocacy, and the traditional role of judges as quiet, rational arbiters of the truth-finding process.”

That was a risk Storm says she recognized when she set up the Birmingham gun court.

But, Storm says, “the juvenile judge is a different brand of cat. Our historical role was to rehabilitate children. Juvenile courts have always been involved in community action.

“The reason gun court works is it comes out of our office. We lead it, but we didn’t do it on our own. Every other criminal justice agency in town worked together to make it work. And it’s working.”