Encyclopedia
in re Gault: Argued December 6, 1966; decided May 15, 1967. Vote of Court 8-1
[Battle]:
In June 1964 an Arizona woman received an obscene phone call placed by two boys, one of whom was fifteen-year-old Gerald Francis Gault. Gault was on probation for having been in the company of another boy who had pick-pocketed a woman. Arrested by the county sheriff, he was taken to a Children's Detention Home without any effort made to contact his parents, who were working. The following day, at Juvenile Court, the assistant probation officer filed a petition to have Gault declared a juvenile delinquent and placed in the State Industrial School until he was twenty-one. Gerald's parents were not told about the petition at a second Juvenile Court hearing, and only learned of it over two months later at the habeas corpus hearing. Because no appeal was permitted by Arizona law in juvenile cases, Gault's six-year commitment was challenged by his parents through a writ of habeas corpus filed with the Supreme Court of Arizona and was referred by it to the Supreme Court as In re Gault ("in re" is the Latin phrase meaning, "in regard to.")
[Opinion]:
A wide majority of the justices of the Supreme Court decided that Arizona's juvenile court system had failed to provide adequate notice of charges, denied Gault the right to counsel, the right of confrontation and privileges against self-incrimination and cross-examination, and also denied him the right of appellate review and access to a transcript of proceedings. All were violations of procedural safeguards specified in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Supreme Court's unambiguous opinion declared that the Fourteenth Amendment and Bill of Rights were not for adults alone.
[Context]:
Prior to the early Nineteenth century, minors involved in the criminal justice system were typically charged once they were old enough to form criminal intent (around the age of seven) and received adult punishment when they were capable of mature reasoning (around the age of fourteen). In the early 1800s, reform schools emerged as an option for judges who did not wish to place juveniles in correctional institutions (education being viewed as necessary for a young person to reform). In 1850, the Ohio State Reform School was the first reformatory to provide vocational training. Industrial schools (such as the one Gerald Gault was sent to in the 1960s) were considered a progressive step since they were designed to spare juveniles from the hard labor, like chain gangs, used as punishment in adult institutions. The state intended that industrial school would prepare juveniles for employment as productive members of society at the end of their sentences. For those juveniles not sent to reform or industrial school, the Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency urged separation of youthful offenders from adult convicts in prison and crusaded for the establishment of a completely separate juvenile court system. The first juvenile court was established in Cook County, Illinois in 1899; by 1925, all but two states had juvenile courts.
Although the juvenile court system was intended to protect children from abuses, it unwittingly developed problems of its own. If Gerald had been eighteen, an adult, the maximum sentence he would have received would have been a fine of $5-$50.00, or a maximum of two months in prison, as opposed to the six-year term the juvenile court meted out.
[Impact/Consequences]:
In the words of Robert Mnookin, "Gault has served as a wellspring for the development of the constitutional rights of minors....Gault represented the first unequivocal holding that young people, as individuals, have constitutional rights of their own." Going beyond Meyer, Pierce, and Yoder, which recognized competing rights of parents and the government in the protection of children, the Supreme Court, through Gault, established that there was a third party in the tug-of-war that needs to be considered: young people have their own constitutional rights independent of the family and the state. The impact of Gault extends beyond juvenile court procedures to cases involving the rights of children as students in schools, to receive medical treatment, to have a voice in divorce custody hearings and in abuse and neglect cases, and to due process in non-criminal cases. In re Gault has been cited in over 250 Supreme Court decisions to date.
[Quotes]:
"Q. All right, Now, judge, would you tell me under what section of the law or tell me under what section of--of the code you found the boy delinquent?
A. Well, there is a--I think it amounts to disturbing the peace. I can't give you the section, but I can tell you the law, that when one person uses lewd language in the presence of another person, that it can amount to--and I consider that when a person makes it over the phone, that it is considered in the presence, I might be wrong, that is one section. The other section upon which I consider the boy delinquent is Section8-201, Subsection (d), habitually involved in immoral matters."
--Judge Robert E. McGhee, August 17, 1964 testimony at habeas corpus hearing
"Gerald's father was not there. He was at work out of the city. Mrs. Cook, the complainant, was not there. No one was sworn at this hearing. No transcript or recording was made. No memorandum or record of the substance of the proceedings was prepared.... Under our Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court."
--Justice Abe Fortas, 1967 In re Gault opinion
"...neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone."
--Justice Abe Fortas, 1967 In re Gault opinion
"Where a person, infant or adult, can be seized by the State, charged, and convicted for violating a state criminal law, and then ordered by the State to be confined for six years, I think the Constitution requires that he be tried in accordance with the guarantees of all the provisions of the Bill of Rights made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment."
--Justice Hugo Black, 1967 In re Gault concurring opinion
"And to impose the Court's long catalog of requirements upon juvenile proceedings in every area of the country is to invite a long step backwards into the nineteenth century. In that era there were no juvenile proceedings, and a child was tried in a conventional criminal court with all the trappings of a conventional criminal trial. So it was that a 12-year-old boy named James Guild was tried in New Jersey for killing Catharine Beakes. A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was executed. It was all very constitutional."
--Justice Potter Stewart, 1967 In re Gault dissent
[Questions to Ponder]:
List the procedural protections of the Bill of Rights that had not been given to Gerald Gault as a juvenile. Was this fair? What if instead of six rights, only one had been violated. Would that have made a difference?
Many of the justices were disturbed by the vast difference between the sentence Gerald received as a fifteen-year-old in contrast to what he would have received had he been eighteen. Should penalties for juvenile crime be less, more or the same as adults? Does that mean that young people should be considered as responsible for their actions as adults?
What if the crime is murder? For example, Billy the Kid is believed to have committed his first murder at age seventeen--should the law treat his first murder differently than those he committed after he turned eighteen (he is believed to have died between the ages of 19-21 having committed or been involved in twenty murders.)
Should juveniles accused of a crime always go through same procedures in the justice system as adults? This would mean that certain advantages, such as the secrecy of their names and sealing of certain records, would be lost--is that desirable? Do juvenile and family courts have different objectives than regular courts?
Does age become an issue in considering this problem? Should a ten-year-old be treated differently than a seventeen-year-old? Should the courts define a national "age of majority"? What age is appropriate? Should it be defined only for criminal cases, or also for other issues such as work, licensing to drive, drinking, and compulsory school attendance? If defined for all instances, does that undercut child neglect and abuse laws?
In addition to Gerald's rights, were his parents also deprived of rights in this case (and if so, which rights)?
Just as the rights of adults under the First and Fourteenth Amendment are subject to limits, so are the rights of children. However, are the limitations the same? Does the free speech protection of an adult performer to utter lewd remarks extend to student performers in a school-sponsored activity?
[Selected Bibliography]:
Krisberg, Barry, and James F. Austin. Reinventing Juvenile Justice. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.)
Ramsey, Sarah H., and Douglas E. Abrams. Children and the Law in a Nutshell. (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2001.)
Mnookin, Robert H., and D. Kelly Weisberg. Child, Family, and State: Problems and Materials on Children and the Law. 4th ed. (Gaithersburg: Aspen Law & Business, 2000.)
van Geel, Tyll. The Courts and American Education Law. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987.)
[Gateway Links]:
ABA Law Day for Schools, Lessons 7-9, Juvenile Justice: The Case of Gerry Gault:
http://www.abanet.org/publiced/lawday/schools/lessons/79_juvjustice.html
FindLaw for Legal Professionals:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=387&page=1
Indiana State Library Close Up Essay: The Rights of Juvenile Offenders:
http://www.statelib.lib.in.us/www/ihb/publications/cluprjo6.html
Landmark Cases--Expanding Criminal Rights: In re Gault and Argersinger v. Hamlin, Gideon v. Wainright:
http://www.landmarkcases.org/gideon/rights.html
Oyez Supreme Court Multimedia:
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/181/
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