Crime

Oklahoma Defines 'Juvenile' By When Defendant Charged, Not When Act Committed

Shoddy police work and lazy prosecutors now hold more sway over juvenile status than being a juvenile.

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There are plenty of reasons to hate Oklahoma. The way they celebrate screwing over Indians, the racist fraternities, the musical. Oh, and Senator Inhofe’s infantile climate change denial where he knocked the dignity of the Senate down several pegs by bringing a snowball to floor. The list goes on and on. And we can add another item to the list, now that the Oklahoma courts have ruled that the decision to try a kid as an adult is based on the date charged and not the date of the offense.

It shouldn’t take you long to dig into the recesses of your law school memory and piece together that this undermines the primary purpose of the juvenile offender status, namely that these mush-brains don’t conceive morality at the level required for voting, let alone intent. Some crimes are so heinous that prosecutors seek to try an offender as an adult — arguing that the act was so hardened that the kid possessed the criminal intent of an adult. Sometimes the courts agree. But this is a process of deliberation — usually a broken one biased against black kids — but a process of deliberation over “intent” nonetheless.

Oklahoma didn’t much care for these pesky procedural safeguards, so it just got rid of them. In T.G.L. v. Oklahoma, an Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals opinion handed down on March 20, Oklahoma clarified that the decision to try someone as an adult hinges on when prosecutors get around to charging the defendant. No need for “discretion” or “deliberation” if you just wait out the formal charge!

That may sound fantastical, but the facts of T.G.L. bear it out. The defendant was 15 when he allegedly sexually assaulted an “eight or nine” year-old girl by forcing her to “perform oral sodomy.”[1] Prosecutors never charged T.G.L. until he was 25. Initially, prosecutors charged T.G.L. as a juvenile, but later sought trial as an adult. Perhaps they could have successfully argued that given the nature of the alleged offense, T.G.L. should be tried as an adult. We’ll never know because the court decided that they didn’t have to prove a damn thing because T.G.L. was already 25. How convenient!

So a stint in juvie automatically transforms into a few years in the state pen over something completely exogenous to the circumstances of the criminal act. If that sounds foreign to traditional notions of justice, you’re not alone.

As Oklahoma attorney James Wirth breaks down the opinion:

Poorly crafted language in the Oklahoma Juvenile Code and Youthful Offender Act, unlike laws of most nearby states, does not consider the age of a child when a crime occurred. Instead, Oklahoma law asks how old was the child when charged with a crime. Okla. Stat. tit. 10A §§ 2-5-202(A)(1), 2-5-205(A), 2-5-206(A),(B)

Because the court said juvenile or youthful offender status cannot rely on age at the time of an alleged offense, accusers, police and prosecutors may now have an incentive to delay reporting crimes or filing cases. Like those of most states, Oklahoma law provides more severe penalties for older youth and adults.

Until now, Oklahoma courts have often exercised discretion when certifying as juveniles defendants who were younger when alleged crimes occurred. Under the new ruling, prosecutors must charge older defendants as adults for youth crimes. Courts may not certify as juveniles youths who are charged long after an offense allegedly occurred.

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Shoddy police work and lazy prosecutors now hold more sway over juvenile status than being a juvenile. That’s a key point. The court in T.G.L. declared the initial effort to charge T.G.L. as a juvenile “procedurally incorrect,” driving home the point that the procedures of filing trump the substance of the offense.

Kafka nods approvingly.

Obviously this move raises all manner of 8th Amendment concerns. Placing aside the very real probability that some jerkoff Oklahoma prosecutor is likely to seek the death penalty for some killing committed by a 15-year-old[2], the cruelty of trial as an adult is still palpable. Studies indicate that sexual assault is 5 times more likely and inmates are 2 times more likely to be beaten by staff in prisons than in juvenile detention centers. These compared adolescents held in juvie vs. state prison, so the risks — specifically of sexual assault — may not match up to the adults exposed to state prison for juvenile crimes due to this bureaucratic gamesplaying. However, the studies still speak to the comparative cruelty of the urine-soaked hellhole[3] that is the adult prison. And let’s not overlook the stigmatization going forward created by the public record for adult offenders rendering it ever harder to find a livelihood outside of crime. It’s a lot harder to combat recidivism when ex-cons can’t get a straight job.

As I said, there are a lot of problems with Oklahoma. Hopefully this is one the state legislature can fix. But I fear it has about a snowball’s chance on the (state) Senate floor of succeeding.

Oklahoma Juvenile Certification Case Raises 8th Amendment Questions [Wirth Law Office]

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[1] Oh, there’s another reason to hate Oklahoma. Any state still committed to gratuitously using the sodomy language.
[2] Which Wirth notes was specifically rejected in Thompson v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988), but that was a different Court.
[3] Uh, we object to the term “urine-soaked hellhole” when you could have said, “peepee-soaked heckhole”.

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