Ruling will help juveniles facing trial as adults
In a victory for youngsters charged with crimes, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a November 2016 ballot measure, which limited prosecutors’ authority to charge juveniles as adults, applied to all cases that were not yet final when the measure passed.
Under the unanimous ruling, numerous cases around the state, filed against defendants as young as 14, will be transferred from adult court to juvenile court. There, a judge will decide where the case belongs after considering such factors as the youth’s history, maturity and chances of rehabilitation.
While youths in adult court face sentences of up to life in prison, the maximum confinement in a juvenile court case is until age 23.
Defense lawyers told the court a few hundred cases would be affected.
A 2000 ballot initiative, passed during a nationwide uproar about alleged youthful “superpredators,” allowed California prosecutors to charge youths ages 14 and over in adult court for serious crimes. It repealed the previous law that required prosecutors to convince a juvenile court judge that the case belonged in adult court.
The November 2016 initiative, Proposition 57, was sponsored by Gov. Jerry Brown and is one of several recent laws that have relaxed the state’s strict sentencing laws. One provision, not at issue in Thursday’s case, allows inmates serving long sentences for crimes classified as nonviolent to seek release on parole. The measure’s other main feature restores the pre-2000 rules requiring approval from a juvenile court judge before a youth can be charged as an adult.
Thursday’s case came from Riverside County, where prosecutors filed charges in adult court accusing a teenage boy of sexually assaulting a young girl in 2014 and 2015, when the boy was 14 and 15 years old and the girl was 7 and 8.
After Prop. 57 passed, a Riverside County judge ruled that the measure applied to the case, and a juvenile court judge said it should not be tried in adult court. Prosecutors appealed to the state’s high court, which said Thursday that the ballot measure applied to cases that were pending when it passed.
Though the initiative did not say whether it was intended to be retroactive, one of its stated purposes was to “stop the revolving door of crime by emphasizing rehabilitation, especially for juveniles,” Justice Ming Chin noted in the 7-0 ruling.
He cited the court’s 1965 ruling that gave retroactive effect to a law reducing criminal sentences. When lawmakers, or voters, choose to make sentences less harsh, Chin said, they must have decided that the previous punishment was too severe and that the lesser terms should be applied to all pending cases.
That would include cases like the teenager’s in Riverside County that have not yet gone to trial. The court also referred, approvingly, to a lowercourt ruling in another case last year that ordered a new hearing for a 16-year-old who was convicted of murder as an adult and sentenced to 72 years to life, but was still appealing his conviction when Prop. 57 passed.
In that case, and others in which appeals were pending, the conviction would stand, but
a juvenile court judge would decide whether the youth should be sentenced as a juvenile or an adult.
“Juvenile court is rehabilitative. Adult court is about punishment, primarily,” said Rourke Stacy, a deputy Los Angeles County public defender who filed arguments in the Riverside County case. She said the ruling means “looking at kids differently and making communities safer.”
John Hall, spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney, said, “We respect the California Supreme Court’s opinion and appreciate that this issue has been clarified.”
The case is People vs. Superior Court, S241231.