Assessing competence to stand trial in juvenile court cases

¶ … competence important in juvenile court cases? What are the most important considerations to address when assessing juvenile competence and why? Think along the lines of age, intelligence, background, education, etc.

The purpose of the juvenile justice system is primarily to rehabilitate rather than extract retribution from young offenders, but as in the adult justice system, a criminal defendant must still be judged to be capable of participating in and assisting in his or her defense in a meaningful fashion (Grisso, 2008). This is one reason why the offender's age, intelligence, background, education is so important to consider when evaluating whether a juvenile should be tried as an adult, for example, or whether he or she is emotionally competent to stand trial at all.

A very young child is unlikely to be able to adequately participate in constructing a defense because he or she cannot imagine hypothetical scenarios when going over matters with his or her attorney. "An essential part of meaningful decision making is the ability to foresee the consequences of a decision. Defendants must be able to imagine hypothetical situations, envisioning conditions that do not now exist and that they have never experienced, but which may result based on the choices they make. They must then evaluate these potential outcomes, comparing them with what they know or imagine to be more or less desirable or painful in life" such as when accepting a plea bargain or pleading guilty to a reduced sentence (Grisso, 2008). The child must realize what the concepts of guilt and innocence mean in legal terms, if his or her lawyer is giving advice about admitting guilt before the court. This is also true of a seventeen-year-old with the mental age of a child.