Filed a civil rights suit against the detention center for violating the substantive due process rights of a 13-year-old boy with serious mental health problems by failing to protect him from harm while being detained at the center.
Represented Pennsylvania children in challenging the way the state implemented the funding formula that paid for services for delinquent and dependent children.
Filed a civil rights class action lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania law and practices that governed the detention of youth charged with committing delinquent acts.
Juvenile Law Center and two private attorneys filed this brief on behalf of an eleven-year-old charged with the murder of his stepmother. The brief argued that the trial court’s interpretation of the transfer statute requiring the juvenile’s confession at the pre-adjudicatory decertification hearing in order to demonstrate his ability to be rehabilitated in the juvenile system was in violation of his right against self-incrimination and rights to due process and fundamental fairness under both the Pennsylvania and United States Constitutions.
Challenged a provision of the PA Juvenile Act that barred Philadelphia adjudicated youth from returning to their regular public schools after they were discharged from residential delinquency placements.
Filed a federal class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on behalf of the children and families of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who suffered significant harm as a result of ex-Luzerne County juvenile court judge Mark A. Ciavarella and the "kids-for-cash" scandal.
Argued that J.B. should be released from detention pending his adjudicatory hearing in juvenile court because his unlawful detention violates Pennsylvania's Juvenile Act; challenged J.B.'s sentence as against the weight of the evidence.
Argued that a sentence of 110 years to life (three consecutive life-terms) for a non-homicide offense committed as a juvenile violates the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Graham v. Florida.
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