Today, the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth issues the first-ever guidelines for defending children facing our country’s most extreme sentence. “Trial Defense Guidelines: Representing a Child Client Facing a Possible Life Sentence” (“Guidelines&rdquo
seeks to articulate the standard established by Miller v. Alabama for legal representation of children facing life sentences.
The first juvenile court was created in the United States more than a century ago with the recognition that children are developmentally different from adults and possess a unique capacity to grow and change. Yet today, many children are tried in adult court and are too often treated like adults — by prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys alike. Child defendants in adult court are expected to make decisions like adults, even though we know they are less capable of understanding the consequences of their actions and less able to navigate the complexities of the legal system.
[For more of this story, written by Jeff Howard, go to http://jjie.org/op-ed-new-nati...g-defendants/108464/]
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