“We should stop treating juvenile offenders as if they were adults, prosecuting them as adults in adult courts, incarcerating them as adults, and sentencing them to harsh punishments that ignore their capacity to grow. When properly screened, assessed, and provided with trauma-informed care and evidence-based trauma-specific treatment, children who have been exposed to violence and [...]

Niki Kelly | The Journal Gazette Gingerich INDIANAPOLIS – Fourteen-year-old Paul Henry Gingerich won a key judicial ruling Tuesday that gives him a second chance to avoid an adult murder conviction for helping to kill a friend’s stepfather in 2010. The Indiana Court of Appeals found the juvenile-court judge violated his due process rights and [...]

Step by step, the Supreme Court has been trying to reshape the way the American criminal justice system deals with those under the age of 18. In Miller v. Alabama this June, it ruled that a mandatory life sentence without parole for a juvenile is cruel and unusual punishment, even when the crime is homicide. [...]

October 7, 2012

October 16, 2012

October 16, 2012

September 30, 2012

The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth applauds California Governor Jerry Brown’s decision today to enact Senate Bill 9, the Fair Sentencing for Youth Act, which scales back California’s harshest penalty for children—life without parole—and ensures youth convicted of serious crimes get a second chance later in life. In the wake of a landmark [...]

Quantel Lotts was fourteen years old and not yet five feet tall when he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Like most children who are involved in a serious crime at a young age, Quantel’s childhood [PDF] was bleak. Quantel spent the early years of his life in a blighted [...]