Innovative Network Enacting Juvenile Indigent Defense Systemic Change, One State at a Time
Dec 1, 2009, LaWanda Johnson
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court held in In re Gault, that all children have due process rights, most notably a constitutional right to be represented by counsel in delinquency court proceedings. Disturbingly, numerous reports have revealed serious gaps indigent youth face in accessing competent legal services. Created to combat these inequities, the Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network (JIDAN), as a part of Models for Change, is strategically tackling the entrenched systemic issues that impede diligent, competent representation for youth facing charges in delinquency courts.
The Foundation’s JIDAN initiative has the distinction of being the first nationally recognized juvenile justice reform effort to focus solely on juvenile indigent defense. According to Patricia Puritz, executive director of the National Juvenile Defender Center and facilitator of the Network, this peer-to-peer network fosters a collaborative, innovative learning environment that provides targeted strategies to help states improve juvenile indigent defense policy and practice.
“JIDAN has provided a unique opportunity to focus on improving and enhancing juvenile indigent defense systems and is contributing boldly to a growing body of jurisprudence in the area of juvenile law,” says Puritz. “The brilliance of JIDAN is that it allows for enhancements in both the practice and policy arenas, allowing state multidisciplinary teams to tackle systemic reform from the ground up and the top down.” It’s critical to advance these systems because “A highly vulnerable group of children is without adequate access to skilled attorneys who can help them exercise their due process rights. We all know that, far too often, these children are left to fend for themselves, and emerge from court proceedings dazed, confused and oblivious to the collateral consequences that will literally follow them for a lifetime,” noted Puritz.
The JIDAN teams selected to become part of the Network, though led by juvenile defenders, are comprised of a variety of justice system stakeholders. Partnerships were formed to foster previously unchartered collaborations and the pollination of ideas, innovations and reform measures. These strategic alliances provide access to areas, decision makers and grass tops constituencies previously unavailable, maximizing the potential of the Network’s reach, scope and ability to enact systemic reform.
The work of JIDAN unfolds in two major areas: access to counsel generally and the development of statewide juvenile defender resource centers. Taken together, the discrete activities that flow from these two broad areas of work are designed to provide skills training, promulgate best practice standards, establish defender hotlines, develop briefing papers and training materials on cutting-edge topics, and launch pilot projects that will address excessive waiver of counsel and the alarming lack of post-dispositional representation.
JIDAN stakeholders are devising inventive ways to provide training, leadership and support to front-line attorneys at the center of indigent defense in their states. Below are some highlights of their efforts.
Creating standards for excellence
After the release of a 2007 report highlighting “Florida’s high rates of waiver of counsel, lack of zealous defense advocacy, chaotic courtrooms and inadequate defense resources,” Florida juvenile justice stakeholders, brought together by the Juvenile Justice Center at Barry University’s Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law in Orlando, sought to address these issues by providing Florida-specific guidelines of practice for juvenile defenders. These guidelines, compiled from several years of research from other states and the American Bar Association, provide a blueprint for the representation of youth in Florida’s juvenile justice system. JIDAN team member and director of the Juvenile Justice Center, Carrie Lee, said these guidelines provide much-needed support for juvenile defenders in the state of Florida.
“Many times, the juvenile defenders are just given a file and thrown into court without the training that they need to provide quality representation,” said Lee. “These guidelines provide a roadmap for what should be happening at each stage of the proceedings. It literally goes through each step, including conflicts of interest and the ethics around representing children.” Lee added that creating these standards has been one way to improve the quality of representation for youth through JIDAN.
In the Miami-Dade area, Marie Osborne, a Florida JIDAN team member and the juvenile division chief in the public defender’s office, is running a pilot project that uses the guidelines as a training tool for new defense attorneys. If they catch on, Lee believes soon they will be able to take the standards statewide.
“We are awaiting approval from a number of stakeholder organizations including the Florida Bar,” said Lee. To increase the likelihood of appropriate implementation, the guidelines have the built-in incentives of training, performance evaluation, promotions and bonuses. The Juvenile Justice Center believes these new policies and procedures will help dramatically improve juvenile defense practices in the state.
Using technology to help juvenile defenders
Expanding access to training and support services for attorneys representing youth in the juvenile justice system is just one of the targeted areas of improvement for the California JIDAN team. Using the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center (PJDC) in San Francisco as its nucleus, the California JIDAN team created a web-based resource center for juvenile defenders throughout the state. According to Corene Kendrick, staff attorney at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco and JIDAN team member, California has the largest number of youth involved with the juvenile justice system.
“California is such a large and diverse state that juvenile defenders were operating primarily alone, without any assistance, mentoring or access to resources or trainings,” said Kendrick. “The new website will provide them access information and resources that will improve the quality of the representation they providing their clients.”
Launched this past November, in addition to training and trial support for juvenile defense attorneys, the website provides California and Hawaii specific materials, offers a members-only listserv and is staffed by a committee to address news and resource development, litigation support and capacity-building needs.
“The website provides a resource bank with model briefs and motions, articles and other useful tools and information for juvenile defenders,” said Kendrick. “Having model motions and examples of briefs that other public defenders have used successfully on behalf of their clients means they don’t have to re-invent the wheel with each case. The resource bank offers a wide variety of topics areas that will assist in their client representation.”
Kendrick says the goal is to help juvenile defense counsel and advocates in parts of the defense community that have been traditionally underserved. “We have identified attorneys who represent youth in all 58 counties,” said Kendrick. “In addition to the utilizing the website, we are designing traveling trainings focusing primarily on the rural and remote areas in the state.” California’s cross-state collaborative team was a natural fit for the JIDAN Network.
A coordinated state system for assisting defenders
According to Youth Advocacy Project (YAP) Director and MA JIDAN team leader, Josh Dohan, for many years juvenile defense was considered a ‘lesser practice.’ “Practitioners operated under the assumption children were in no danger of a child facing serious time, so why bother investing in zealous representation. As a result, training, support, leadership and oversight for the juvenile defense bar have always lagged behind,” said Dohan.
Fast forward to 2009, with increased collateral consequences for youth – and electronic data harvesting that erodes confidentiality – the difference between a juvenile delinquent and an adult criminal record has deteriorated. In addition, in Massachusetts, transfers to adult prison from juvenile court can occur for youth as young as 14.
“So, as it turns out, this lesser practice is far more complicated than representing adults,” noted Dohan. “And the consequences are dramatic because for these kids entering the juvenile justice system might be the last, best hope of offering effective intervention.”
The Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS), which oversees the provision of legal representation to indigent persons in criminal and civil court, is improving juvenile representation with the formation of the Youth Advocacy Department (YAD). YAD serves as a statewide resource center that provides leadership, training and support to the entire Massachusetts juvenile defense bar. YAD supports direct services to ensure that every child – regardless of their family’s income – has access to zealous legal representation, essential community-based services, and a quality education. According to Dohan, this means juvenile defenders have to be competent not just in the legal system, but in mastering the child welfare and school systems, and understanding mental health issues, families and the youth themselves who, after all, are just kids.
“We are making sure young people are treated fairly, both legally and in terms of being connected to the resources, opportunities and services they need to experience healthy development,” said Dohan. “In turn, this helps them from ending up chronically court-involved their entire lives which, besides being a human tragedy, really tears down communities and families, and costs taxpayers millions of dollars.”
With the help of JIDAN, YAD has created the Juvenile Defense Advisory Council (JDAC) to provide oversight and direction to juvenile attorneys from every county in Massachusetts. “Juvenile indigent defense is an area of practice that has been traditionally neglected,” Dohan concluded. “Fortunately, the MacArthur Foundation, through JIDAN, has recognized that it’s really time to put some resources into elevating juvenile defense to a specialty that competently represents our youth when they come before the court.”
Juvenile Indigent Action Network: Making a difference
Much exciting and comprehensive work is being done in all eight network states. JIDAN is dedicated to creating a juvenile indigent defense system model that ensures top-notch legal defense for youth throughout the juvenile court process that can be implemented nationwide. The strategic innovations in development will ensure that youth have early and timely access to competent, well-trained, and well-resourced counsel and increase the capacity of juvenile defenders to provide comprehensive and thorough legal representation to the youth they serve.
Through the generosity of the MacArthur Foundation, JIDAN is creating and promoting the change needed to strengthen and enhance juvenile indigent defense systems, policy and practice and improve access to and quality of counsel for youth nationwide. To learn more about the Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network, visit www.modelsforchange.net.
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