Legal Problems Arizona Students Face

(The content below was transcribed from an interview done with Acacia Law. We think you'll find it much easier
and more enjoyable to read this way.)

Interviewer: Today we’re going to talk about high school students and college students and the legal troubles they tend to find themselves in and the areas we’re going to talk about is Maricopa County and the Cities of Tempe, Mesa, Phoenix, those kind of stuff and then in Tucson, as well. That right?

Acacia Law: Yes. That’s correct. Those are where we have out two main office locations which are Tempe, Arizona in Maricopa County and Tucson, Arizona in Pima County. Essentially, we share Pinal County between us, which has one high school in it, Florence High School which is right near the superior court house.

In Tempe, we have Arizona State University, ASU and down in Tucson we have a lot of college kids as well from what they call U of A or University of Arizona as well as up in Flagstaff we represent kids from the Northern Arizona University, or what they call NAU. Essentially, because we have our offices in two, what are considered, college towns we handle a lot of cases involving high school students, juveniles and college students who find themselves in various troubles with the law.

Interviewer: So, high school verses college… who is more badly behaved, in your experience?

Acacia Law: Well, it’s funny. A lot of the things that when I was in high school weren’t considered crimes. We had touched on some of them the other week concerning dating and sexting and texting involving kids who are under the age of 18, minors, but there’s other aspects that come into play now that make it sort of balanced. Who’s more in trouble? I don’t know if kids in high school have necessarily become worse so much as the laws concerning crimes like theft, again, the all the types of obscenity and sex crimes that we previously discussed, possession charges, whether it be drugs, marijuana, minors in consumption is a very common one, wherein a minor, sorry, someone under the age of 21 is consuming alcohol.

Those are the most common ones that we see coming out of the high school, also curfew violations. Those are, oftentimes what we have to do, depending on the age of the juvenile, it’s going to be either treated as something that will be addressed in adult court or something that will be addressed in juvenile court. The reason that we have so many students, high school students, who are actually charged in adult court is because the juvenile court really only has jurisdiction over an individual up until the point the point in time which they reach the age of majority, which is 18 years of age.

So, if you have someone who’s 16 or 17 years old who commits any sort of crime the juvenile court is only going to be able to monitor them for a year or two. What happens is that, what we found is that if they’re cases are left in juvenile court we have to do a little bit extra work sometimes because the courts and the prosecutors sometimes add more punishment than we think is appropriate under the circumstances because they’re trying to pack so much into this short span of time that they have jurisdiction over the juvenile.

Interviewer: Really.

Acacia Law: Yes. That’s actually one of the strategic considerations that prosecutors make when dealing with juvenile offenders is whether to charge them in juvenile court or not.