A Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spokesperson said it “cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer’s statements constituted a ‘true threat.’ The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday that it won’t file criminal charges against a Phoenix police officer who allegedly threatened to shoot the city’s mayor. Mayor Kate Gallego was given additional law...
Generations of historical trauma and increased exposure to violence make young Native Americans more vulnerable to the complicated, often contradictory clutches of the juvenile justice system, legal experts say. Once in the justice system, Native children become lost in a jurisdictional web, a dysfunctional state system, and a federal system that has no proper place for them.
An estimated 76,000 young people are charged as adults each year. Most are for nonviolent crimes, such as drug and property offenses. Tens of thousands of children, mostly teens, are prosecuted as adults every year, and some serve out their sentences in prisons where most of the inmates are adults. Nationally, no single organization tracks...
The Gault case determined that children have the same rights to due process as adults, including access to a lawyer. However, children are still systemically denied this right. One day in June 1964, Gerald Gault and a friend made a bad decision. They made an obscene phone call to Ora Cook, Gault’s neighbor. Cook called...
A 2018 study on the Phoenix Police Department found that nearly 45% of respondents said officers only made the situation worse. Protesters over the summer called for defunding Phoenix police, motivated in part by a deep skepticism about officers’ ability to properly handle mental health crises. Activists point to police shooting deaths of mentally ill...