Encyclopedia of American Activism by Margaret DiCanio

Author:Margaret DiCanio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504036689
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

I

In Re Gault (1967)

On May 16, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court decision known as In re Gault gave children some legal rights. For most of recorded history, children were chattels of their parents—usually their fathers. Not until the nineteenth century did society perceive a need to protect children from abuse, neglect, and exploitation in the workplace. For centuries, children who did nothing more than steal food to stay alive were jailed with hardened criminals. Despite a widely held belief that childhood was an evil state, nineteenth-century reformers labored to move children out of adult prisons. At the turn of the century, Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, proposed the creation of a separate juvenile court for children. The first was set up in 1899, and by 1920 every state in the United States had some form of juvenile court.

From the outset, the juvenile court system was seriously flawed. Based on the idea that the court should be free to rehabilitate rather than punish the child, the judge was given total control over the child’s life. This effectively deprived an accused child of any of those rights an accused adult possessed—facing one’s accuser, trial by jury, and so on. The juvenile court judge operating in the “benevolent” juvenile court had powers unavailable to judges in the “adversarial” adult court. No safeguards protected the child. The state did not have to prove a crime had been committed. Because the scope of the juvenile court was so broad, it became a dumping ground for children other institutions could not handle. The combination of a court without constraints and overcrowding did extraordinary damage to children’s lives.

Change came in the system with the Gault decision. The case began in 1964, when 15-year-old Francis Gault was placed on probation for being in the company of a boy who stole a wallet. While Gault was still on probation, a neighbor claimed that he had made an obscene phone call to her. Without notifying Gault’s parents, the police picked the boy up. Only after Gault’s older brother went looking for him did the family discover that he was in a local detention center. A deputy at the center told the family that a hearing was scheduled the next day.

Two hearings were held. The woman who complained appeared at neither. Even though the judge had never seen or spoken with the complainant, he sentenced Gault to the state industrial school “for the period of his minority, unless sooner discharged by due process of law.” The same offense for an adult would have drawn a fine or a month or two in prison. The judge concluded that Gault was a “habitual delinquent,” because, in addition to being in the company of the boy who stole the wallet and being accused of making the phone call, two years earlier a boy had accused Gault of taking his baseball glove, a claim for which there was no evidence.

The Gault family instituted habeas corpus proceedings. Writs of habeas corpus require that a prisoner be produced for a hearing to determine the legality of his detention.

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