in re Gault

387 U.S. 1 (1967), argued 6 Dec. 1966, decided 15 May 1967 by vote of 8 to 1; Fortas for the Court, black and White concurring, Harlan concurring in part and dissenting in part; Stewart in dissent. From the turn of the century until the 1960s, the assumptions of juvenile justice had drawn inspiration from the reform ideology of the Progressives. State intervention into the juvenile's life was justified as parens patriae, that is, a protective, paternal interest in the welfare of a wayward or otherwise distressed child. This approach led to a nationwide institutional distinction between the adversary process of adult criminal adjudication and the flexible and informal decision making created for juvenile proceedings. Separate legislative codes and correctional alternatives were established for juveniles whose behavior would have been considered criminal if they were adults.

The growing problem of juvenile misconduct and a popular perception that the juvenile justice system was failing both society and its clientele called into question the assumptions of that system and attracted the attention of both scholars and government officials. Following the Supreme Court's landmark rulings that brought unprecedented procedural reforms to federal and state criminal justice systems, it seemed inevitable that the justices would also place the nation's juvenile justice system under the scrutiny of constitutional due process.

The Court first signaled its interest in the area in Kent v. United States (1966), a 5‐to‐4 decision that rejected a cursory waiver of Kent's juvenile status so that he might be tried as an adult. The majority used the occasion to speculate that a juvenile—faced with incarceration in an informal juvenile proceeding, yet unprotected by the due process guarantees afforded adults under the Constitution—might encounter “the worst of both worlds” (p. 556). Developing this theme boldly a year later, Justice Abe Fortas's opinion in Gault attacked the entire juvenile justice system, with only Justice Potter Stewart disagreeing on the merits of the case.

At issue was the commitment of fifteen‐year‐old Gerald Gault to Arizona's State Industrial School until his majority (a maximum of six years), following his adjudication as a “delinquent child” for making an obscene phone call to a neighbor while on probation for another juvenile offense. Had Gault been tried as an adult, his maximum punishment would have been a fifty‐dollar fine or two months incarceration. What made Gault's case significant was that, despite the severity of his punishment, Arizona law afforded him virtually no “due process” at all—no official notice of his precipitous hearings (he was committed within a week of the offense), no notification that counsel could be present at the hearings, no opportunity to confront or cross‐examine the woman who complained about the phone call, and no protection against self‐incrimination. His questionable admission about taking part in the phone call became the primary basis for the commitment.

Fortas took the opportunity to question broadly the wisdom of parens patriae as the guiding principle of juvenile adjudication. He then tailored a careful holding that extended many (but not all) of the rights of adult criminal defendants, under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, to those juveniles subject to a deprivation of liberty upon adjudication of delinquency. Included were adequate and timely notice of charges and hearings, notice of the right to counsel at adjudication, the right to confront and cross‐examine witnesses, and the protection against self‐incrimination. Justice Fortas argued that the extension of these protections would not interfere fundamentally with the distinctive informality and flexibility of juvenile adjudication.

The majority opinion was controversial both on the Court and off. Justices Hugo Black and John M. Harlan used the case as an occasion to continue their ongoing debate about the proper interpretation of “due process” as it applied to the states—a debate that grew more heated in a subsequent juvenile justice case, In re Winship (1970). Justice Stewart dissented primarily on the ground that the majority's decision ran the risk of making the juvenile process identical to the adult criminal process, thus recreating the problem that the Progressives had attacked at the turn of the century.

Gault and its practical consequences for juvenile justice (particularly the decision's emphasis on procedural compliance and its injection of defense counsel into the system) have produced considerable controversy, although the case remains the constitutional landmark for juvenile adjudication. Critics have attacked the decision as part of the larger “due process revolution” of the 1960s, charging that the Warren Court majority placed too much faith in the efficacy of procedural remedies to accomplish substantive reforms in criminal justice. Particularly with regard to Gault, critics complain that an overemphasis on due process, on the one hand, diverts attention from the larger substantive issue of the system's fundamental capacity to develop appropriate remedies for delinquent behavior and, on the other hand, adds to the case management woes of the already overburdened juvenile courts.

See also Due Process, Procedural; Juvenile Justice.

Bibliography

• John R. Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640–1981 (1988).
• Stanton Wheeler and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., Juvenile Delinquency: Its Prevention and Control (1966)

— Albert R. Matheny

• 387 U.S. 1 (1967)
• Vote: 8–1
• For the Court: Fortas
• Concurring: Black, White, and Harlan
• Dissenting: Stewart

Gerald Gault, a 15-year-old boy, made obscene telephone calls to a neighbor. At the time, he was on court-ordered probation for a different act of juvenile delinquency.

As a juvenile, Gault did not have the standard constitutional guarantees of due process, such as the right to counsel, the right to confront or cross-examine one's accuser, the privilege of protection from self-incrimination, and the right to notice of a legal hearing. The juvenile justice system was separated from the usual criminal processes applied to adults. The intention had been to protect juvenile offenders from the harshness of adult criminal law. But these good intentions could in some cases lead to injustice, which is what Gault's advocates claimed.

If Gault had been tried as an adult, his punishment would have been a $50 fine or two months in jail. As a juvenile offender, he was sentenced to the Arizona State Industrial School until the age of 21, a six-year sentence. Further, Arizona law provided juvenile offenders virtually no due process rights, such as those set out in the 5th and 6th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

A state juvenile court judge convicted and sentenced Gerald Gault after two hearings. Gault's father sought his son's release from state-imposed detention on the grounds that he had been denied due process rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

The Issue

Do the due process rights of individuals, specified in the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments, apply to juveniles, just as they do to adults accused of crimes?

Opinion of the Court

The Supreme Court decided that Gerald Gault had been denied his constitutional rights of due process. Justice Abe Fortas declared that “neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone…. Under our Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court…. The essential difference between Gerald's case and a normal criminal case is that safeguards available to adults were discarded in Gerald's case.”

Justice Fortas held that due process of law for juveniles required at least four procedural protections of individual rights: written notification of specific charges to the juvenile and his parents, assistance of a lawyer, confrontation and cross-examination of witnesses, and protection against self-incrimination.

Justice Fortas argued that the guarantee of these four due process rights for juveniles would not require the state to treat a juvenile accused of delinquency exactly like an adult accused of crime. Rather, these safeguards would protect a juvenile against injustices that otherwise might occur.

Significance

This is the Court's most important decision about the rights of juveniles accused of illegal actions. It established that juveniles have certain constitutional rights that cannot be taken away solely because of age. However, the Gault decision did not abolish distinctive qualities of a separate juvenile court system. In particular, the due process requirements of Gault apply only to the adjudication (hearing and deciding) phase of legal proceedings and not to the conviction phase. Thus, Gault does not interfere with the emphasis that juvenile courts have traditionally placed on personalized treatment for rehabilitation of the individual.

See also Due process of law; Juvenile justice

Sources

• Thomas J. Bernard, The Cycle of Juvenile Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

In Re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967), addressed the question of whether the criminal justice provisions of the Bill of Rights applied to minors. Chief Justice Earl Warren predicted this decision would become the Magna Carta for juveniles. The case involved Gerald Gault, a fifteen-year-old probationer, who had been arrested for making an obscene telephone call. Gault was held by the police while he was interrogated for several days, and, following the sort of informal proceeding then typical in juvenile courts, was sentenced to a state school until he turned twenty-one.

Justice Abe Fortas viewed Gault's case as a vehicle for reforming what he regarded as a failed juvenile justice system. The way to improve a system that simply bred criminals, Fortas believed, was to insist that juveniles be given many of the same rights that the Constitution guaranteed to adults. His Gault opinion declared that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required giving juveniles written notice of the charges against them, allowing them to confront their accusers, and informing them that they had a privilege against self-incrimination and a right to be represented by an attorney (an appointed one if they were indigent). The effect of Gault was to affirm that children have constitutional rights, although their rights are somewhat more limited than the rights of adults.

Bibliography

Kalman, Laura. Abe Fortas: A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

Walker, Nancy E., Catherine M. Brooks, and Lawrence S. Wrightsman. Children's Rights in the United States: In Search of a National Policy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999

Originally, juvenile court was a place for the informal resolution of a broad range of matters concerning children. The hearings were not adversarial. Instead, they focused on the juvenile's best interests. A juvenile was brought to the juvenile court, the prosecution presented evidence, the juvenile and other witnesses gave testimony, and the juvenile court judge made a decision based on the perceived best interests of the juvenile.

In the same spirit of informality, juvenile courts provided fewer procedural protections than did adult courts. Juveniles did not have the right to a court-appointed attorney or to notice of charges of criminal behavior. They did not have the right to confront accusers and cross-examine witnesses. They did not have the right to a written record of the proceedings or to appeal the juvenile court judgment.

The problem with this lack of procedural protections was that a juvenile risked losing his or her liberty for several years. The best interests of the child usually involved placement in a secure reformatory or some other secure facility until the age of eighteen or, in some states, twenty-one. This amounted to a deprivation of liberty similar to that resulting from a prison sentence.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that would change dramatically the character of juvenile courts. In In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 87 S. Ct. 1428, 18 L. Ed. 2d 527, fifteen-year-old Gerald Gault was committed to a reform school until age twenty-one for allegedly making an obscene phone call to a neighbor. Gault had been found delinquent without receiving notice of the charges or the assistance of an attorney. In addition, Gault had been interviewed by a probation officer without having an attorney present, and the statements made in this interview were submitted as proof that Gault had made the obscene phone call.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Gault's commitment to the reformatory constituted a deprivation of liberty. This meant that Gault should have been provided with most of the procedural protections afforded to adults in criminal prosecutions. According to the Court in Gault, "[U]nbridled discretion, however benevolently motivated, is frequently a poor substitute for principle and procedure."

The purpose of the Gault decision was to make juvenile proceedings more fair to the juvenile. The decision accomplished this, but it also made juvenile proceedings more adversarial. With the increased procedural protections, juveniles became more capable of resisting commitment to secure reformatories, and it became more difficult for the juvenile courts summarily to obtain control over juveniles.

The adversarial tenor in contemporary juvenile courts is thus an unfortunate by-product of the decision in Gault. Prosecutors must now work harder to persuade the juvenile court to find in favor of the state so that the system may take control of the juvenile. They must shift the focus of juvenile court proceedings away from the needs of the juvenile and onto the offense. This shifted focus is similar to the focus of proceedings in adult criminal court, and it amounts to a reversal of the traditional emphasis in juvenile court.

See: Adversary System; Children's Rights; Criminal Procedure; Juvenile Law.

In re Gault
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 16, 1966 Decided May 15, 1967
Full case name	In re Gault et al.
Citations	387 U.S. 1 (more) 87 S. Ct. 1428; 18 L. Ed. 2d 527; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1478; 40 Ohio Op. 2d 378
Prior history	Appeal from the Supreme Court of Arizona
Holding
Juveniles tried for crimes in delinquency proceedings should have the right of due process protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · William O. Douglas Tom C. Clark · John M. Harlan II William J. Brennan, Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Abe Fortas
Case opinions
Majority	Fortas, joined by Warren, Douglas, Clark, Brennan
Concurrence	Black
Concurrence	White
Concur/dissent	Harlan
Dissent	Stewart
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Amend. XIV

In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision which established that under the Fourteenth Amendment, juveniles accused of crimes in a delinquency proceeding must be accorded many of the same due process rights as adults such as the right to timely notification of charges, the right to confront witnesses, the right against self-incrimination, and the right to counsel. The court's opinion was written by Justice Abe Fortas, a noted proponent of children's rights.

Contents 1 Case background 2 Decision 3 References 4 See also 5 External links

Case background

On the morning of 8 June 1964, the sheriff of Gila County, Arizona, took fifteen-year-old Gerald Gault into custody — without notifying Gault's parents — after a neighbor, one Mrs. Ora Cook, complained of receiving a "lewd or indecent" telephone call.^[1] After returning home from work that evening to find her son missing, Gault's mother eventually located him at the county Children's Detention Home but was not permitted to take him home.^[2]

According to Gault, it was his friend Ronald Lewis who made the call from the Gault family's trailer in Globe. Gault claims that Lewis had asked to use his telephone while the former was getting ready for work. Then — not yet knowing to whom Lewis was speaking — Gault relates, “I heard him, ahem, using some pretty vulgar language … so I — all I did was walk out, took the phone off him, hung it up, and told him — I says, ‘Hey, there's the door. Get out.’”^[3]

Judge McGhee of the Gila County Superior Court, acting in his secondary capacity of juvenile court judge,^[4] presided over Gault's preliminary hearing the next morning^[2] — which he ended by saying he would "think about it" — and Gault remained in custody for several more days until being released without explanation. On Gault's release, his mother received a note from the superintendent of the Detention Home informing her that "Judge McGHEE has set Monday June 15, 1964 at 11:00 A. M. as the date and time for further Hearings on Gerald's delinquency"; this was the family's only notification of that hearing.^[5] At the 15 June hearing, Judge McGhee found "that said minor is a delinquent child, and that said minor is of the age of 15 years", ordering him confined at the State Industrial School "for the period of his minority [that is, until 21], unless sooner discharged by due process of law." The charge listed in the report prepared by the county probation officers was "Lewd Phone Calls".^[6] Incidentally, had Gault been an adult and convicted in criminal court for a violation of ARS § 13-377, at the time the punishment was limited to a maximum prison sentence of two months, accompanied by a fine of $5 to $50.^[7].

Gault's accuser, the neighbor woman Cook, was not present at either hearing, Judge McGhee claiming "she didn't have to be present".^[8] Indeed, more than forty years later, Gault lamented “I still don’t know what that lady looks like”.^[3]

With no witnesses having being sworn and the court making no transcript of either hearing, those present later disagreed about what had gone on during the June 1964 hearings; in particular, Gault's parents in later sworn testimony contested McGhee's claim that the teenager had admitted in court to making any of the alleged lewd statements.^[5][8]

Arizona law at the time permitted no appeal in juvenile cases, so Gault's parents petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus to obtain their son's release, the Supreme Court referring the case back to McGhee's own Superior Court for hearing. There, on 17 August, "McGhee was vigorously cross-examined as to the basis for his actions."^[9] He testified:

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 Section 8-201, Subsection (d), habitually involved in immoral matters.^[10]

The first law McGhee mentioned was Arizona Revised Statutes (ARS) § 13-377, which made a misdemeanor of using "vulgar, abusive or obscene language" while "in the presence or hearing of any woman or child".^[9] Violating this law, then, would meet the ARS § 8-201(6)(a) criterion for classification as a "delinquent child", i.e., "A child who has violated a law of the state or an ordinance or regulation of a political subdivision thereof".^[11] The alternate criterion McGhee cited was that of ARS § 8-201(6)(d): "A child who habitually so deports himself as to injure or endanger the morals or health of himself or others."^[11] In other words, McGhee found Gault delinquent for (1) on one occasion using obscene language on the telephone with a woman and (2) being "habitually" dangerous. The evidence for the latter, according to McGhee's testimony, was that (a) two years earlier there had been a vague report, which the court had not acted upon due to (in McGhee's words) a "lack of material foundation", concerning the theft of a baseball glove; and (b) Gault's admission that in the past he had made telephone calls the judge described as "silly calls, or funny calls, or something like that".^[7] On this basis, Judge McGhee ordered the teenager to serve six years in juvenile detention.

After McGhee's Gila County Superior Court dismissed the habeas corpus writ, the Gaults appealed,^[12] and the case went to the state Supreme Court (99 Ariz. 181 (1965)). The bases of the appeal were:

1. the Arizona Juvenile Code was unconstitutional because it (a) did not require that either the accused or his parents be notified of the specific charges against him; (b) did not require that the parents be given proper notice of hearings; and (c) allowed no appeal;^[7] and
2. the Gila County Juvenile Court's actions constituted a denial of due process because of (a) the lack of notification either of the charges against Gault or of the hearings; (b) the court's failure to inform the Gaults of their right to counsel, right to confront an accuser, and right to remain silent; (c) the admission of "unsworn hearsay testimony"; and (d) the lack of any records of the proceedings.^[13]

The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of the habeas corpus writ. They acknowledged that the constitutionality of the Juvenile Court proceedings required adherence to due process,^[14] but, in affirming the lower court's dismissal of the habeas corpus writ, found that the Arizona Juvenile Code in general and the Gault proceedings in specific did not violate due process.^[13] Upon their affirmation, the case was appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Decision

In an 8-1 decision the United States Supreme Court ruled that Gault’s commitment to the State Industrial School was a clear violation of the 14th Amendment, since he had been denied the right to an attorney, had not been formally notified of the charges against him, had not been informed of his right against self-incrimination, had no opportunity to confront his accusers and had been given no right to appeal his sentence to a higher court. Justice Potter Stewart was the sole dissenter. He argued that the purpose of juvenile court was correction, not punishment, and the constitutional procedural safeguards for criminal trials should not apply to such juvenile trials.

References

1. ^ 387 U.S. 1, 4. Justice Fortas noted that "for purposes of this opinion" it was sufficient "to say that the remarks or questions put to her were of the irritatingly offensive, adolescent, sex variety".
2. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 5.
3. ^ ^{a b} Gerald Gault, in National Constitution Center, "Children under the Constitution" panel discussion, 7 November 2007.
4. ^ 387 U.S. 1, 5, n. 1.
5. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 6.
6. ^ 387 U.S. 1, 7-8.
7. ^ ^{a b c} 387 U.S. 1, 9.
8. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 7.
9. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 8.
10. ^ 387 U.S. 1, 8, n. 5.
11. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 9, n. 6.
12. ^ Note that the Gaults could not appeal the Juvenile Court's finding of delinquency; they were at this point appealing the Superior Court's dismissal of the habeas corpus writ.
13. ^ ^{a b} 387 U.S. 1, 10.
14. ^ 387 U.S. 1, 12.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 387

External links

• Oral arguments on Oyez.org
• National Constitution Center, "Children under the Constitution" panel discussion, 7 November 2007.

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