Report upbraids St. Louis County

U.S. cites juvenile-justice bias

The Justice Department said Friday that the juvenile justice system in St. Louis County, Mo., treats black youths more harshly than white youths and deprives all low-income youths accused of crimes — no matter what race — of their basic constitutional rights.

In a 61- page report describing serious and routine violations of youths’ rights, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said youths accused of a crime are given little or no chance to stay out of detention, dispute the charges against them or have the help of a lawyer.

Among the most fundamental problems in the county’s Family Court is that for a county with 1 million people, there is just one, overwhelmed public defender for youths , who handled 394 cases in 2014.

“What immediately could they do, by way of a start, is they could add public defenders,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division, said in a conference call.

The county — which includes suburbs of St. Louis, but not the city itself — is the same region that drew international scrutiny for its law enforcement practices last year, after a police officer in Ferguson fatally shot Michael Brown, 18. The shooting sparked weeks of civil unrest and a scathing Justice Department report.

Though unrelated to the department’s investigation in Ferguson, the latest report again raises questions about racial discrimination and profiling in the St. Louis area.

Gupta said department lawyers had to meet Thursday with county court and state officials to present the findings before making them public, and hope to reach an agreement with them on what needs to be done . If that fails, she said, “we certainly have the ability to litigate.”

Both the state court system and the St. Louis Family Court declined to comment on the report.

The report suggests that the court denied fundamental due process rights to thousands of people who were judged to have committed crimes and were sent to juvenile detention. Individuals may use the findings to try to reverse those adjudications, but it is not clear whether anyone will try to do so on a wholesale basis.

The Justice Department found that judges were far more likely to put white youths than black youths into diversion programs, rather than proceeding with a formal court process that could lead to the equivalent of jail. Black minors were much more likely to be held in detention pending adjudication of their cases, to be put into detention after their cases were finished and to be transferred to adult court, where the penalties are more severe.

When asked about the reason for such disparities, Gupta referred to studies that have shown “the role of implicit bias when there are discretionary decisions being made.”

A court case typically begins with a judge ruling whether there is probable cause to proceed and to hold the defendant in detention. But the Justice Department reported that in St. Louis County, youths are illegally denied the chance to challenge the evidence for that ruling or for rulings on whether to transfer a case to adult court.

The poorest defendants in Missouri can be represented by a state-funded public defender. In other courts across the state, the Justice Department found, the public defender’s office decides whether a person is poor enough to qualify for that free representation; in St. Louis County Family Court, the decision is made by the judge, and different judges use different standards or no set standard at all.

People who are not as poor but still cannot afford a lawyer are assigned to one of a handful of private-practice lawyers, but typically not until the defendant has already been in detention for a week or more and sometimes for months.

Reviewing transcripts of cases handled by the public defender, the Justice Department found that the lawyer never challenged a probable cause finding, hired an expert witness or appealed a judge’s finding; the lawyer rarely asked for mental health examination of the youth , moved to dismiss charges and challenged hearsay evidence or leading questions. Out of 277 public defender cases resolved last year, just three had the equivalent of a trial; most ended with the minor admitting guilt.

The report released Friday was based on a separate investigation that began in November 2013, nine months before Brown was killed — one of four inquiries the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has started into what it says are troubled juvenile justice systems.

An investigation into Shelby County, Tenn., which includes Memphis, found similar problems to the ones documented in St. Louis County, and officials there agreed to make changes to the system; conditions in Lauderdale County, Miss., are the subject of litigation, and an investigation into Dallas County, Texas, has just gotten under way.