Police stops and juvenile court in Alabama: under 18, the 72-hour hearing, and when a case goes adult

Alabama's juvenile code defines a child as anyone under 18. It also keeps a case in juvenile court past 18, up to age 21, when the conduct happened before the 18th birthday. So a 17-year-old charged in Montgomery stays a juvenile case even if the hearing lands after a birthday.

The floor under every juvenile court in the country is In re Gault, a 1967 Supreme Court case about a 15-year-old in Arizona sent to a state institution after a hearing with no lawyer, no sworn witnesses, and no real notice. The Court held that a young person facing a delinquency charge has the right to notice of the charges, to a lawyer, to confront and cross-examine witnesses, and to refuse to answer questions that could be used against them. Alabama builds on that: state law creates a Child's Attorney, a licensed lawyer who owes the child the same loyalty and confidentiality an adult client gets, and who must follow the child's own decisions about the case, not the parents' and not the lawyer's own idea of what is best.

A police stop on the street in Alabama works the way it does anywhere: you can give your name, and you can say you do not want to answer other questions and that you want a lawyer. Alabama's statute on the rights of the child (Code of Alabama section 12-15-202) is the state rule that governs questioning and a young person's protection against self-incrimination, and Alabama's public defender guidelines tell defense lawyers to check whether a child was even capable of understanding a Miranda warning before waiving it. We could not read the full text of that section on the Legislature's site, so ask your Child's Attorney what it requires in your case; the calm step at the stop itself is the same either way. Ask for a parent and a lawyer before answering.

If a child is taken into custody on a delinquency petition and not released, the juvenile court must hold a hearing within 72 hours. At that hearing the judge decides two things: whether there is probable cause (a reasonable basis) for the charge, and whether the child should stay in detention at all. Alabama law also says no one under 18 may be held in an adult jail or lockup, with narrow exceptions: up to six hours for processing, or after the case has been transferred to adult court.

There are two doors to adult court in Alabama. The first is a transfer hearing, which is possible for a child who was at least 14 at the time of the conduct; the judge weighs a set of statutory factors and decides. The second is automatic. A person who was 16 or older at the time of the conduct and is charged with a capital offense, a Class A felony, a felony involving a deadly weapon, a felony that caused death or serious physical injury, drug trafficking, or certain assaults on officers, teachers, or court officials is not in juvenile court at all; the case is filed as an adult case from the start. Once someone has been convicted as an adult under that rule, later charges go to adult court too.

The Supreme Court's most important recent ruling on young people in the adult system came from Alabama. In Miller v. Alabama (2012), an Alabama 14-year-old, Evan Miller, had been sentenced to mandatory life without parole for murder. The Court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing law that requires life without parole for a juvenile convicted of homicide; a judge must be able to consider the young person's age and circumstances first. Judges in Alabama and everywhere else now have to hold that kind of individual hearing before such a sentence.