A 61-page report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division concludes that black juvenile offenders are treated more harshly than their white counterparts, and low-income youths of both races are being deprived of their basic rights, as stated by the New York Times.
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Ferguson and the St. Louis area have become a touchstone for civil rights activists protesting police and court treatment of minorities after an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in August 2014 by a white Ferguson police officer. The 60-page report arrived just over a week before the anniversary of Brown’s death, August 9.
The Justice Department also criticized the structure of St. Louis County Family Court.
An investigation, which the department started in 2013, found, among other things, that the family court fails to provide children with adequate counsel, sets up systems that could coerce children into admitting guilt and fails to provide probable cause for children facing delinquency charges. Though unrelated to the department’s investigation in Ferguson, the new report again raises concern about racial discrimination and profiling in the St. Louis region. That report was begun following the shooting of Brown, and negotiations between the DOJ and Ferguson officials are ongoing. They also examined 14,000 pages filled with family court records, transcripts, policies, procedures and external reports.
The department has accused the court of harsh treatment of black youths, who are given a much harder time than whites, while given less opportunity to benefit from legal help in certain decision stages throughout their trial.
The report said the court failed to ensure that young defendants have adequate legal representation, failed to make required findings of probable cause that a child committed the charged offense, and failed to ensure that a child’s guilty plea was voluntarily. Among them were “staggering” caseloads of the public defenders assigned to handle all indigent juvenile delinquency cases in the county, an arbitrary system of appointing private attorneys for children who do not qualify for public defender services and significant delays in appointing counsel to children following detention hearings. That setup is “contrary to separation of powers principles”, Gupta wrote.
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Justice has launched dozens of these investigations since Congress passed a law in 1994 that allowed the department to sue local agencies over violations of constitutional or federal law. The investigation was among four of juvenile justice systems initiated by the Justice Department in recent years: -The DOJ reached a settlement in 2012 with the Juvenile Court of Shelby County, Tennessee, calling for various reforms.
