From Juvenie Justice Information Exchange:
Opinion: What replays in my mind is the judge who proclaimed that my then 16-year-old Black client was destined to “spend the rest of his natural life in prison” because he’d appeared before that judge one too many times, including for having stayed out past his group home’s nightly curfew.
Through no fault of his own, that client was a deeply scarred individual. At age six, he was thrust into a foster-care system that, for sure, shores up many children but also lets some kids drown. By the time he was 13, he’d been remanded to a juvenile detention center for taking someone’s cell phone.
The New York City judge who’d projected that my client would end up in prison held true to his threat. That Black teen eventually was sentenced to five to seven years in an adult facility. This, because he’d, again, broken curfew, and he’d been charged in connection with a second-degree robbery. Continue reading >>>
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