She had just turned 13 when she ran away from home and got into a scuffle with the police officer who found her.
Charged with assault, the teen was housed in a youth center operated by the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. When it was time for her first appearance in D.C. Superior Court, a DYRS agent instructed the teen to kneel on a chair and placed iron shackles, which were connected to a metal belt around her waist, onto her ankles and wrists. She waddled into the courtroom.
“I felt like a dog on a leash. Like an animal,” the teen, now 16, recalled. Embarrassed and frightened, she remembered seeing her mother in the courtroom and several adults she did not know. She started to cry, but couldn’t wipe her tears because the restraints kept her from raising her arms to her face. Her attorney, Penelope Spain, asked that the shackles be removed for the hour-long proceeding, but the judge denied the request.
The girl’s case and others like it have led advocates and defense attorneys to call on the court to end its practice of routinely shackling incarcerated youths during court proceedings — and to instead use the restraints only in instances where a juvenile is deemed to be a risk.
[For more of this story, written by Keith L. Alexander, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...3cbd15c1a_story.html]
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