John Baily, Rome News-Tribune
Almost everyone agrees that Georgia’s juvenile justice system needs to be revamped, but there appears to be some disagreement about how it should be done.
"Common Wisdom: Making the Case for a New Georgia Juvenile Code" was released in December by the Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice and Just Georgia, a nonprofit legal advocacy group for children.
The study, a collection of opinions of the juvenile code gathered through interviews with judges, juvenile agencies, lawyers and law enforcement throughout the state, addresses not just criminal offenses but also “status offenses” such as neglect, deprivation and truancy issues.
“The juvenile code was adopted around 1970, and since then there has not been a revision — except for piecemeal revisions,” said Rome’s Norman Fletcher, former Georgia Supreme Court chief justice and a member of the Georgia Appleseed board.
“(A revision would be) a great step forward and, again, would revise procedures to work well in today’s atmosphere,” Fletcher said.
The group is hoping the legislature will take up the issue this session and that they will produce a more streamlined code.
“Both sides of the aisle have some interest,” said Sharon Hill, executive director of Georgia Appleseed. “There is a significant interest in this effort.”
Floyd County Juvenile Court Judge Tim Pape disagreed that there needs to be a full-scale rewrite of the code.
A wholesale revision of the juvenile code is impractical, Pape said. He also is worried about the impact the legislature might have on any new version of juvenile laws.
“The reality is that a rewrite ought to be done and instituted and adopted — and done by the very people who practice it,” said Pape. “The best people to make recommendations on how to get that done is a group of judges.”
As an example of legislative interference in the code, he cited the institution of the “Seven Deadly Sins,” seven major felonies in which a child is automatically treated as an adult.
Pape said a judge should review the facts of the case each time a child is to be treated as an adult in a court of law. He said the “Seven Deadly Sins” law takes the ability of oversight away from the juvenile court judge.
Those juveniles automatically show up in Superior Court, where the application of the law leans more toward punishment than rehabilitation, Pape said.
There are many ideas within the suggestions that are academically good ideas, he said, such as appointing an attorney for every child.
But that could drastically increase costs in an already shrinking budget.
“I can kind of understand where (the authors of the study are) coming from, but if you really know what you’re doing and you’ve been here a while, it’s not a problem,” said Pape.
Hill said the study isn’t intended to produce academic responses to the problems but to suggest solutions.
“Our hope is to help our legislators hear from all these courts (around the state),” said Hill.
The study also suggests more cooperation and coordination between agencies that deal with juvenile issues.
“I think this community is doing really well,” Pape said. “This community has a real good reputation of a collaboration and a cooperation between agencies.”
Luckily, in Floyd County Pape said there are a number of services as a judge that he can use before it comes to the point where a kid has to be detained.
“We have a lot of services in Floyd County,” he said. “But, you go to South Georgia, and ... there are no such services. The reality is the (Department of Juvenile Justice) provides those services — and the reality for a judge in South Georgia is that the only sanction he has is to lock a kid up.
“Locking a kid in the YDC is the last resort for changing a kid’s behavior,” said Pape.
Another suggestion in the study is that the age at which a suspect can be tried as an adult be raised to 18 from 17.
“There is good rationale —from an academic standpoint,” Pape said. “It makes no sense to say you can’t contract, you can’t buy a car you’re not an adult until you’re 18, but you’re an adult when it comes to committing a crime.”
He said there’s little chance of that recommendation becoming a reality because the state would have to ship resources from the adult system to the juvenile system to handle the influx of cases.