Black Juveniles Tried as Adults at Alarming Rate in Missouri

From [HERE] Despite an unusual state law requiring judges to consider racial disparity when deciding whether to try juveniles as adults, Missouri prosecutes a disproportionate number of Black youth accused of serious crimes in regular courts, where they can be sentenced to prison alongside hardened criminals.

In recent years, African-American teenagers have faced trials in adult courts at a rate three to four times higher than their proportion of Missouri’s youth population. They were defendants in 57 percent of such prosecutions in 2008, the latest year statistics are available, even though they make up only 14 percent of state residents between ages 12 and 17.

One possible reason for “the high amount of disparity,” the wording of a free legal clinic at Washington University in St. Louis that defends lower-income juveniles, is that Missouri does not require juvenile judges to hold a probable cause hearing before transferring a case. Nor do a dozen other states, including California and Maryland, and also Washington, D.C. The nation’s courts have a long history of meting out harsher punishment to African Americans when judicial discretion is relatively unfettered.

Juvenile courts in those 13 states and the nation’s capital could be violating a Supreme Court ruling, Kent v. United States, which states judges must determine, before transferring cases to adult court, that they are strong enough to secure a grand jury indictment. That 1966 decision requires that such criminal complaints against juveniles must have “prosecutive merit” and “measure up to the essentials of due process and fair treatment.” [MORE]