LOUIS (AP) The U.S. Department of Justice released a report critical of the St. Louis County Family Court on Friday, alleging that black youths are treated more harshly than whites, and juveniles are often deprived of constitutional rights.
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The county – which includes suburbs of St. Louis, but not the city itself – is the same region that drew worldwide scrutiny for its law enforcement practices last year, after a police officer in Ferguson fatally shot Michael Brown, 18.
“In short, black children are subjected to harsher treatment because of their race,” Gupta wrote in a letter addressed to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, the St. Louis County Executive, and the Family Court Administration Judge, according to a report by the Associated Press.
“It is assembly-line justice, if you can call it justice at all”, she added. Black children are also nearly one-and-a-half times more likely than white children to have their cases handled formally, rather than through diversion or other means, the Justice Department found.
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 department is taking a similar tack as after a report released in March alleging racial bias and profiling by police and the municipal court in Ferguson. The report stated that children had been held without properly determining probable cause, and that juvenile offenders had sometimes pleaded guilty without fully understanding the consequences. 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.
“In addition, the funding priorities of our state have rendered our public defender system largely incapable of zealously defending the large number of cases coming through our juvenile courts each year”. The court’s own legal officers play the role of prosecutors in the court, but are not “ethically constrained to pursue justice or act in accordance with the public interest”, according to the report. ” That setup is “contrary to separation of powers principles, ” said Gupta”.
“Given the substantial infrastructure already in existence in the Missouri juvenile justice system, and the commitment to children articulated by the Court officials and other stakeholders with whom we spoke during this investigation, we believe that the remedial measures identified in this Report are obtainable.”
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The DOJ reached settlement in 2012 with the Juvenile Court of Shelby County, Tennessee, calling for various reforms.
