Comments on Current Events In Criminal Law from the Federal Criminal Courts in Texas

November 19, 2007

THE RESPONSE TO JUVENILE CRIME AND YOUTH VIOLENCE

Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd

In the 1970s, when crime and violence had turned the nation’s big cities into urban arenas of fear, suspicion and distrust, Former Houston Police Chief B.K. Johnson told TIME Magazine (March 23, 1981) that “we have allowed ourselves to degenerate to the point where we’re living like animals. We live behind burglar bars and throw a collection of door locks at night and set an alarm and lay down with a loaded shotgun beside the bed and then try to get some rest.” Former Louisiana Corrections Secretary C. Paul Phelps said that “the most dangerous creature in the world is the 16 or 17 year old kid who comes from the ghetto. It makes no difference whether he’s white, black, Hispanic or Chinese.”

FBI statistics from the 1970s showed that the peak ages for violent crimes were from 15 to 17 years of age. In 1974 more than 77,000 juveniles were arrested for one of the violent crimes listed in the FBI’s Index. TIME reported that “young people commit most of the violent crime in America. Fully 57% of all arrests for such offenses in 1979 were criminals under the age of 25; one fifth were under 18.” The 25 year olds arrested in 1979 were 17 years of age in 1974; the 18 year olds arrested in 1979 were 13 years of age in 1976.

In 1980 there were some 4000 murders committed in New York and Los Angeles alone. TIME pointed out there was “something new about the way that Americans are killing, robbing, raping and assaulting one another. The curse of violent crime is rampant not just in the ghettos of depressed cities, where it always been a malignant force to contend with, but everywhere in urban areas, in suburbs and peaceful countrysides. More significant, the crimes are becoming more brutal, more irrational, more random – and therefore all the more frightening.”

Today the Center for Disease Control reports that youth violence is even more widespread in the United States. It is now the second leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 10 and 24. The following CDC figures reflect the scope of the problem:

• 5,570 young people aged 10 to 24 were murdered in the U.S. in 2003 – an average of 16 per day.
• More than 780,000 violence-related injuries in young people aged 10 to 24 were treated in emergency rooms in the U.S. in 2004.
• 36 percent of high school students in a 2005 nationwide survey reported being in a physical fight during the preceding 12 months.
• 7 percent of high school students in the 2005 survey reported they had taken a gun, knife, or club to school during the preceding 30 days.
• An estimated 30 percent of the nation’s school kids between the 6th and 10th grade report being involved in bullying.

The CDC reports that youth violence has far-reaching social implications. It increases health care costs, decreases property values, and disrupts social services. The center has put the cost of youth violence at more than $158 billion each year. The CDC has established a list of primary factors that increase the risk of youth violence which includes but is not limited to the following:

• Prior history of violence
• Drug, alcohol, or tobacco use
• Association with delinquent peers
• Poor family functioning
• Poor grade in school
• Poverty in the community

In 2001 the Houston CHRONICLE conducted a survey that found only one in 4 people in Harris County supported the death penalty for juveniles who committed a murder when they were 17 years of age or younger. Nationwide that same year just 26 percent of the people polled supported the death penalty for juveniles.

In 2005 the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to execute a person who committed his crime when he was 17 or younger. At the time 19 states allowed for execution of 16 year olds, although Oklahoma was the only state that had executed someone who killed while that young since the death penalty was resumed in this country in 1976. Texas had set the age for execution at 17 years – and, along with six other states (Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia), the state executed seven such murder defendants, including one from Harris County.

In the 2001 CHRONICLE article Houston criminal defense attorney Stanley Schneider pointed out that in more than 300 Texas statutes 17-year-olds are considered children. He said that most Texas laws consider 18 years of age as the year of adulthood. 17 year old Texans cannot vote, join the Army on their own, drink legally, or consent to an abortion without parental permission.

"But a 17-year-old commits a crime and they're thought to be mature enough to face the death penalty," Schneider said. "We all know 17-year-olds, many of them don't have the sense to come in out of the rain. We all know that 17-year-olds are mature one moment and act as children in the next. They don't understand the nature of their conduct. At what point does a child become an adult? Is it by virtue of their birthday?"

While Harris County was denied an opportunity to execute the more than two dozen juvenile killers it had sent to Texas’ death row before the 2005 Supreme Court ruling, the “war on juvenile crime” declared by the county in the 1990s has resulted in half of the convictions of all juveniles tried as adults in the state of Texas coming from this county. The CHRONICLE reported that this disproportionate rate of “juveniles-tried-as-adults” convictions occurred “despite youths here accounting for just 15 percent of all the juvenile crime in Texas, according to a review of state and local statistics.”

Section 54.02(a)(2)(B) of the Texas Family Code allows juveniles over the age of 15 to be tried as adults. Over the past decade Harris County has prosecuted more juveniles as adults than Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant and Travis counties combined. When the “war on juvenile crime” was declared, Harris County certified 170 juveniles to be tried as adults. The number declined steadily over the next decade to approximately 55 a year between 2003 and 2005. The certification process has become so perfunctory in Harris County that, as the CHRONICLE reported, judges certified 90 percent of the requests by prosecutors to try juveniles as adults.

“Most juvenile offenders facing certification are poor, so their court-appointed attorneys, who struggle with heavy caseloads, may not have the time or resources to challenge prosecutors,” reported the CHRONICLE.

CONCLUSION

States no longer execute “juvenile killers.” They send them to prison for long periods of time; some to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. In 2002 the FBI reported that there were 16,200 murders committed in this country – a significant decrease from the approximately 25,000 murders committed in 1979. Still, in 2002, 1300 murders (or 8% of the total murders) were committed by juveniles - some 69 percent of them committed by a killer with a firearm.

In Philadelphia this year (through October 12) some 315 murders were committed – with an increasing number of them being committed by juveniles with firearms according to local law enforcement officials. A 14-year-old Philadelphia youngster posted his motto on a MySpace page: “Mess with the Best, Die like the rest.” He listed in interests as “shooting … war, the North Hollywood shoot-out, bank robbers, the Columbine massacre.”

Social apologists offer a laundry list of environmental reasons (some call “excuses”) to explain why America’s children are so violent. Many of these reasons are not only socially unacceptable but pose a dangerous threat to a sane and reasonable criminal justice system. But at least one reason – violence spewing from the entertainment industry through videos, musical lyrics, computer games, movies, etc. – has produced a new breed of “criminal terrorists” who have been weaned on a cinematic morality that fosters a lawless social attitude that “mess with the best, die like the rest.”

Violent children are the product of parental neglect/abuse, stressed out and dysfunctional educational institutions, morally bankrupt religious institutions, hopelessly corrupt political institutions, and unspeakably violent and abusive juvenile institutions.

The warning signs have long been in the public arena. In a 1973 Reader’s Digest article, former Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Jesse L. Steinfield estimated that 40 million children between the ages of 2 and 11 watched television on an average of 3 ½ hours per day and would see over 100,000 incidents of violence and 13,400 deaths before they reached the age of 12

Youth violence, therefore, is not a new phenomenon. Big city “gang rumbles” captured the nation’s news media headlines in the 1950s. Americans were torn between outrage and fascination over that kind of gang violence as evidenced by the success of the West Side Story. But gang violence today is markedly different than it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It has changed from simple gang rumbles to vicious attacks, and murder, on innocent bystanders as part of some “initiation” ritual.

There is no question that there is an increasing need in this country for social protection from juvenile offenders. The nation’s criminal justice system must find a swift, certain, and rational way of responding to these child criminals. Trying them as adults, imposing harsh sentence, and placing them in violent-infested state prisons ruled by gang violence, homosexual rape, and official corruption is not a rational response. It simply reinforces a violent criminal ethic.

Perhaps placing the “juvenile predators” is currently the only criminal justice option available to most states. But the nation’s political and educational institutions must step up to the plate and pick up the slack for the failed family unit. This means increased vigilance over children being victimized by domestic violence, subjected to sexual abuse in the family, and exposed to casual drug use and “entertainment” violence in the “rap-drug” culture.

Juvenile predators, the “mess with the best-die like the rest” thugs, mirror the soul of the society that produced them. They are born babies; they are made predators. Public rants from law-and-order politicians and hate-filled demands for vengeance from crime victim advocates are not the answer. They only fuel the cycle of social violence.

America does not need any more social “wars” – “war on terrorism,” “war on crime,” “war on juvenile crime,” “war on drugs,” or even wars on poverty, teen pregnancy, truancy, domestic violence, and bullying. America needs responsible, decent, and honest actions by its political, educational and legal systems that produce a society whose citizens respect law and order, due process, and equal protection of the law for all people. The “us-against-them” mindset afflicting this nation – Democrats/Republicans, liberals/conservatives, Christians/Muslims, color against color – inevitably produces hatred, mistrust, and violence among its diverse population. It creates a “free” society as fraught with tension, paranoia, and corruption as an imprisoned keeper-kept society. Such a society becomes a prisoner of its own making.

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