This week, WWL’s Scoot asked “should the names and pictures of juvenile suspects be released to the public?”
Scoot said he thinks that they should.
“I think they should be released,” he said. “I think it’s time to stop pandering to the thug punks that know they get special treatment because they’re young. And then the mentors, the criminal mentors who are teaching them what to do, they know that they’re protected, so they want to use younger people. I think we just need to expose the whole thing.”
Arthur R. Bloom agreed with Scoot in a 1996 article published in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.
“The practice of preserving juvenile confidentiality, one of the last vestiges of the paternalism that flowed from the state’s role of parens patriae, is dissolving,” he wrote. “Society will no longer allow those youth who engage in serious crime to escape accountability”
However, Scoot acknowledged that “not everybody agrees,” adding that “according to one theory, juveniles are entitled to more privacy because they’re not culpable adults and because juveniles are considered more sensitive and they need more confidentiality than adults.”
“Even though there should generally be no across-the-board legal barriers to student media publishing minor names – in print or online – there are valid reasons for not doing so in some circumstances,” according to the Student Press Law Center. “For example, many news organizations do not, as a rule, publish the names of young people accused of less serious crimes.
Some news organizations, for example, have adopted internal policies to not name minors unless they are charged adults. Children, the thinking goes, should not be stigmatized for the rest of their lives for an error in judgment they made while growing up.”
In 2015, Pew reported that Pennsylvania courts had ended lifetime sex offender registration for juveniles.
“Driving the changes are concerns that putting juveniles’ names and photos on a registry – even one only available to law enforcement, as in some states – stigmatizes them in their schools and neighborhoods and makes them targets of police, sometimes for inappropriate behavior rather than aggressive crimes,” it said. “Also of concern are laws that add youth sex offenders to adult registries once they turn 18 or 21, even though they were tried as juveniles, not adults.”
In recent years, there have also been new approaches to juvenile detention. According to the Sentencing Project, “the momentum to protect youth rights in the criminal legal system is clear.”
It said that 25 states and the District of Columbia have banned life sentences without the possibility of parole for people under 18 and that in nine additional states, no one is serving life without parole for offenses committed before age 18. As of early 2020, a Sentencing Project survey found 1,465 people serving juvenile life without parole sentences, a 44% drop compared to 2012.
“Research on adolescent brain development confirms the commonsense understanding that children are different from adults in ways that are critical to identifying age-appropriate criminal sentences,” the organization said.
When it comes to making juvenile offender information public, the Supreme Court is also on Scoot’s side.
“I found out that in a unanimous decision, 1979, the US Supreme Court ruled in a case, Smith v. Daily Mail, which is a news publication,” he said. “That the First Amendment protects the right of journalists to use the names of minors in newsworthy stories as long as the information is lawfully obtained and truthfully reported.”
Under those conditions, “the state cannot restrict a newspaper from publishing a juvenile offender’s name unless the restriction serves a substantial state interest,” said an Oyez summary of the case.
“In this particular case, the Supreme Court struck down a West Virginia law that had been used to prosecute two West Virginia newspapers,” Scoot explained.
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