And no one claims that all of these children are innocent of the charges they face. But that doesn't excuse state court officials—judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys—from ensuring that the rights of these young suspects are respected. With their young lives hanging in the balance, they are receiving terrible advice, or no advice at all, even though they have a constitutional right to counsel that has been recognized by lawmakers in Georgia itself.
It's about lack of funding and too little judicial backbone.
"Children routinely appear in a juvenile court without counsel because all of the public defenders are attending proceedings in one of the Superior Courts in the Circuit," the complaint alleges. "As a result, some children ... are tried and sentenced without counsel despite their desire to be represented by counsel. In 2012, the juvenile courts of the Cordele Circuit handled 681 juvenile delinquency and unruly cases. The public defender reported handling only 52 of those cases."
Here's a representative case about a
black girl, age 13, identified only as "A.J." in the complaint. This grim chronology—children of color being processed through a system civil rights lawyers rightly call an "assembly line justice"—occurs over and over again, before the same judge in this county, without that judge or anyone else in power or authority there doing anything to halt the cycle. From the complaint:
On October 24, 2013, Plaintiff A.J. appeared in the Ben Hill County Juvenile Court to be arraigned on the following charges from four separate cases that all stemmed from incidents at school: affray, simple battery, disorderly conduct, and four counts of disrupting a school. On that day, she requested a lawyer to represent her and spoke with an assistant public defender present in court.
Plaintiff A.J. denied all of the allegations against her. She was told she would be notified of a future court date in which she could present any testimony from witnesses on her behalf. Less than a week before the scheduled hearing, Plaintiff A.J. was served a notice to return to court on December 5, 2013 for an adjudication hearing.
Between October 24, 2013 and December 5, 2013, no one from the public defender’s office got in touch with Plaintiff A.J. to discuss the charges, the state’s evidence, possible witnesses for the defense, possible defenses, or mitigating factors.
On December 5, 2013, Plaintiff A.J. and her mother walked about a mile to reach the court because the family does not have a car and public transportation is not available. When they reached the court, Plaintiff A.J. learned that her case was continued for another week because all of the public defenders were in Crisp County Superior Court handling cases. No one from the Cordele Circuit Public Defender’s Office notified Plaintiff A.J. or her mother in advance to inform them of the Public Defender’s planned absence or of the continuance.
On December 13, 2013, Plaintiff A.J. appeared in Ben Hill County Juvenile Court again; this time, a public defender was present. This was Plaintiff A.J.’s first time seeing a public defender since her arraignment on October 24, 2013. Minutes before court began, the public defender informed Plaintiff A.J. that the prosecutor was seeking detention time. Plaintiff A.J. planned to deny all of the charges against her, but decided to admit to all of the charges because she had not talked to her public defender before that day in court and she did not believe he was prepared to mount a defense.
Defendant Judge Pack accepted Plaintiff A.J.’s admissions and ordered Plaintiff A.J. to serve fourteen days in detention and twelve months on probation. Defendant Pack also imposed $50 in court fees and $50 in public defender application fees in each of her four cases.
Plaintiff A.J. was told she could begin her sentence after the Christmas holiday, but she did not want to miss school, so she said she was willing to be taken into custody immediately. A.J. was taken into custody that day and sent over seventy miles away to the Waycross Regional Youth Development Campus, where she was detained through Christmas until December 27, 2013.
A.J. is now under probation supervision and is required to pay court costs and public defender application fees. She remains under the court’s jurisdiction and is subject to future reprimand and probation revocation proceedings because, under Georgia law, probation can be revoked based on a failure to pay fines, and Plaintiff A.J. is unable to pay her court-ordered fees.
You could use this example in a law school exam: identify the ways in which this young defendant's due process rights were violated. Start with the judge—a former prosecutor named Kristen Pack who just five years ago was quoted as saying
this in a local puff piece: "Sometimes I want to come off the bench, give a kid a hug and tell him, 'It's going to be all right.'" Based upon the allegations of the complaint, Judge Pack would be better off if she stayed on the bench, stopped acting like a prosecutor's surrogate, and rejected some of these "deals" she's been so quick to endorse. If she won't stand up for the rights of these young defendants (euphemistically called "Respondents" by the state) who will?
