DOJ: St. Louis County’s Juvenile Justice System Is Lacking In Justice

Rampant constitutional abuses afflict juvenile justice in Missouri.

In November 2013, well before the police shooting of Michael Brown shined a light on racial tensions in the greater St. Louis area, the Department of Justice had already begun investigating the St. Louis County juvenile justice system for a host of issues including racial discrimination. Last week DOJ released its investigation report, and to call the results “not pretty” would be an understatement. Read on for details.

Let’s start, as the DOJ report does, with some context. “Juvenile justice” is the usual name we give to court proceedings for children accused of committing crimes. In the early 20th century, DOJ says, the juvenile justice system was a sort of legal Wild West: “Children found to have committed the same delinquent act were subjected to widely varying dispositions, ranging from court supervision to institutionalization for the duration of their childhood.” That changed in 1967, when the Supreme Court handed down In re Gault, imposing some constitutional order — the right to counsel, the privilege against self-incrimination, and basic procedural protections, for example — on that previously all-but-lawless system. (And all-but-lawless it was — Gault himself had been given effectively a six-year sentence for making a lewd phone call.)

Since Gault, that’s the way the juvenile justice system is supposed to be — constitutionally sound. But it’s not the way the system has been operating in St. Louis County. An April 2013 report by the National Juvenile Defender Center (NJDC) concluded that “youth are discouraged from and systematically denied counsel” in most Missouri counties, and that “this denial of due process is well known, and it is deeply entrenched in the culture of many juvenile courts” throughout the state. DOJ characterizes the NJDC report this way: “the NJDC concluded that… Missouri’s juvenile justice system largely functions in a ‘pre-Gault’ fashion.” And so, not long after NJDC released its report, DOJ opened its own investigation.

Over the next 20 months, DOJ statistically analyzed some 33,000 cases from the St. Louis County juvenile justice system, reviewed the family court records of 120 children, read a host of court transcripts and procedural documents, toured the courthouse, directly observed one detention hearing, and interviewed people ranging from court personnel to lawyers who interact with the system to parents of children in the system. Then last week DOJ released the results of all that work.

What DOJ found squares with NJDC’s conclusions — except it’s worse. Using DOJ’s own words, it found:

  • “that the St. Louis County Family Court fails to ensure that children facing delinquency proceedings have adequate legal representation”;
  • “that the Family Court violates children’s privilege against self-incrimination, fails to provide adequate probable cause determinations, fails to provide children facing certification for criminal prosecution in adult criminal court with adequate due process, and fails to ensure that children’s guilty pleas are entered knowingly and voluntarily”;
  • “that the Family Court structure creates significant and unavoidable conflicts of interest that run contrary to separation of powers principles and deprive children of adequate due process”;
  • “that the St. Louis County Family Court engages in conduct that violates the constitutional guarantee of Equal Protection”;
  • “that Black children are disproportionately represented in decisions to: formally charge youth versus handle matters informally; detain youth pretrial; commit youth under existing Court supervision to Division of Youth Services custody; and place youth in a secure Division of Youth Services facility after conviction.”

So for those keeping track, we have DOJ concluding that the St. Louis County juvenile justice system violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth amendments. The facts underlying those violations are pretty extreme, too. For example: there’s just one full-time public defender assigned to the St. Louis County juvenile justice system — that’s a county with over a million people — and her office had opened 394 new cases in fiscal year 2014. At the time of DOJ’s visit to her office, her open docket numbered 209 cases, including a murder. Some numbers from the PD’s juvenile justice docket in fiscal 2014: out of 301 delinquency and status-offense cases, only three were contested; there were only seven motions to suppress filed and all were boilerplate; there were zero probable-cause challenges; and there were zero appeals filed. DOJ characterized this as “a system devoid of adversarial process.”

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There are more procedural defects that I won’t go into here (but if you’re interested, I’d encourage you to read the report), many seemingly stemming from the fact that the prosecutors and all-powerful “Deputy Juvenile Officers” or DJOs are court employees rather than executive employees. In fact, DOJ noted mid-paragraph at one point that “Both the perception and the reality are that the judge and the DJO are one entity.”

And, finally, the racial disparities. In this case, numbers speak for themselves. Controlling for variables including the severity of the offense and the age and risk profile of the offender, DOJ concluded that “Black youth have two-and-a-half times (2.50) greater odds of being detained (held in custody) pretrial.” Imprisonment at later stages was much higher for Black children too: “Cases involving Black youth are almost three times (2.86) more likely to involve commitment to Division of Youth Services” under conditions akin to probation or parole, and “the odds of the Court placing Black youth in Division of Youth Services custody are more than two-and-a-half times (2.748) the odds of White youth being placed, even after controlling for age, gender, risk factors, and the severity of the allegations involved.” Those are some pretty shocking differences, and it was not much of a stretch for DOJ to conclude that there’s a systemic Equal Protection violation occurring in St. Louis County.

The DOJ report concludes with a set of recommended “remedial measures,” all of which are likely pretty obvious: pump up the juvenile PD’s office, make a bunch of procedural changes to the system, give the executive branch control over prosecution of juveniles, and take steps to better understand the causes of the racial disparities in the system. And undoubtedly, faced with strong evidence of wide-ranging and significant constitutional violations, Missouri will take DOJ up on its professed “commit[ment] to seeking a voluntary resolution to address the deficiencies identified in our investigation.”

But that’s small comfort to the hundreds if not thousands of children who have been railroaded over the years by a system that, at least according to DOJ, is deeply, systemically unfair.


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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.