This brief to the Connecticut Supreme Court dealt with a Connecticut statute that allows a prosecutor to choose the forum in which youthful offenders are tried. Amici argued that this statute deprived youthful offenders of their right to due process by placing sole discretion to waive in the hands of the prosecutor.
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.
Juvenile Law Center argued that juvenile court should retain discretion to spare children from permanent stigma associated with lifetime sex offender registration.
Argued that a provision in New Mexico state law allowing juveniles to be sentenced by juvenile court judges as adults if the judge found them “not amenable to treatment” was unconstitutional under the Sixth Amendment.
Argued that the use of delinquency adjudications to enhance an adult criminal sentence violates US Supreme Court precedent as well as California's commitment to maintaining a separate juvenile justice system.
Argued that a juvenile’s 75-year sentence for a crime in which the victims suffered no serious injury is disproportionate and violates state, federal and international law.
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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