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(602) 357-8606 (espanol)
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Tucson, AZ 85701
(520) 468-6668
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What Can Happen In Juvenile Court

(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: So, is it your goal, okay, when you’re dealing with a juvenile, is it your goal to keep them out of adult court or is maybe sometimes your goal to get them into adult court because they’ll have an easier time of it?

Acacia Law Strategically sometimes I prefer if their charged as adults, as opposed to charged in juvenile court. Albeit it’s true that in juvenile they don’t face criminal charges per se unless their charged in adult court with crimes, but a lot times the behaviors or the crimes that are considered delinquent in juvenile court a superior court judge in adult court really does not think is a big deal at all and we can get it reduced to something wherein the person may have no criminal record whatsoever.

The only advantage though strategically to, besides the fact you’re not charged technically with criminal behavior in juvenile court is that you’re records can be sealed as a juvenile. However, most people are under the misapprehension that sealing a record means that no one will ever have access to this child’s delinquency case and that is not correct. I’ll give you one example that I run across again and again and again and is one of the reasons why I try to get rid of these charges or allegations as they come up in juvenile court.

What happens is, if their charged later as an adult for anything felony related their juvenile record will be part of the sentencing report if they either plead guilty or are convicted. Not only the judge, but the state as well as the defense attorney will have the person's juvenile record disclosed. Once they do that basically the record that they accumulated as a juvenile will be taken into consideration in terms of how they are sentenced as an adult, which is why it makes it so important that they get their juvenile delinquency charges reduced to something as little as possible.

I have had kids from the Tempe area, whether it be Corona, Del Sol, James Madison, McClintock High School, Tempe High School, Marcos de Niza. I mean, basically, what I’ve seen happen is that those kids... I have one case where a kid had no adult record but he had a string of delinquencies and where he committed an armed robbery and ordinarily a judge would have probably given him two years, the judge gave him six years until I talked him out of it and he split the difference with me and made it four. But see he tripled the sentence based on the kid’s juvenile history.

Interviewer: Even though it had been many years or at least some years since he was a juvenile?

Acacia Law Yes. He hadn’t been to juvenile for about four, it was about four years. He was about 22 when the crime occurred. That didn’t matter to the court. They looked, he had a number of delinquencies as a juvenile and, again, I’m just using one case. I have this happen all the time. Every single adult case that I have, if they have a juvenile record it is disclosed. It’s kept confidential, it’s not disclosed to the public, but it is disclosed to the court, to the state and to the defense.

Interviewer: So, that’s all that matters?

Acacia Law Yes. At that point your sealed record is actually not sealed anymore, obviously, and it’s also not only unsealed it’s actually being weighed in and considered in term of what’s an appropriate sentence for you as an adult, based on what you did as a kid which makes it all the more important to take care of juvenile cases as seriously as you take care of adult criminal cases. Because the impact down the road can be severe.

Interviewer: All right. Do you have any ability to try to push a case either into juvenile court or into adult court or back and forth or you're kind of stuck with what the prosecutor wants?

Acacia Law I’ve been able to talk to some prosecutors, made request, made a request to a supervisor to review a case and reconsider transferring it to one court or the other depending on what I think is in the best interest of the client. Sometimes they’ll agree with you, sometimes they won’t. Basically, they have their own set of standards and policies and they stick with them, but if you have a case that’s close, it could go either way, yes, I’ve been able to ask them if they could, for example, dismiss it from adult court and submit it in juvenile court.

They’ll obviously evaluate the case themselves to begin with. But, as I said, some of them are kind of in a grey area and I’ve been able to intervene and assist in that regard. I have no legal authority to make it happen, but what I can do is what I said. I will contact the prosecutor, the supervising prosecutor and see if I can make some sort of arrangement wherein the individual has the case dismissed from the ones court’s jurisdiction and re-charged as a crime in an adult court or charged as a delinquency in juvenile court.

Again, you don’t normally want to bring a child to adult court unless you think that you can get it reduced down to something that will be far less significant and egregious circumstances might call for in juvenile court.