Street Roots • April 1-7, 2016
News
Page 5
JUVENILE, from page 4
prison sentence, and they weren’t willing to
risk that outcome.
Now Bullitt is a convicted felon, and he
will be on intensive probation in the adult,
system for three years. He remained in
custody for 16 days while awaiting the plea
deal, and if he violates probation, he could
face incarceration for up to one year.
“Even when youth plead to lesser
offenses, they are still stuck in the adult
system, and they are served by probation
officers and other people who are really
experienced and have a better
understanding of adult offenders than they
do of youth offenders,” said Mark
McKechnie, director of Youth, Rights &
Justice.
“Roughly half, now, of the youth that are
committed to the Oregon Youth Authority
are there on an adult sentence,” he said.
In January, there were 311 youths in
Oregon Youth Authority correctional
facilities serving adult sentences. These
youth can’t participate in work release and
other community-based programs available
to youths serving time on juvenile
sentences, even though they are held at the
same facility.
“You could have two youth who are very
similar, in terms of their risk and their
behavior,” said McKechnie, “but if you have
one under a juvenile sentence, OYA has a lot
more options, including releasing them, that
they don’t have for a youth under
Department of Corrections supervision.”
The practice of trying juveniles as adults
has come under increasing scrutiny in
recent years as scientific research has
emerged showing an adolescent’s brain is
not fully developed until they are well into
their 20s.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy is
pushing his state to include offenders up to
the age of 21 in juvenile court He’s also
proposed extending certain juvenile justice
protections to young adults as old as 25,
such as keeping their crimes confidential.
Several countries in Europe already have
similar policies in place. Germany has tried
young adults up to age 21 in juvenile court
since 1953.
While the age a person is charged as an
adult in most states is 18, in some states,
such as Texas, it’s 17, and in New York and
North Carolina, a defendant is considered an
adult at age 16.
In Oregon, district attorneys have
diverted more than 4,000 juveniles younger
than 18 through adult court under Measure
11 since 1995, but prosecutors’ propensity
to use Measure 11 in juvenile cases varies
from county to county.
“We tend to see that Multnomah County,
along with a couple other counties, is much
more inclined to file Measure 11 charges
(against juveniles) when they can,”
McKechnie said.
Bobbin Singh, director of Oregon Justice
Resource Center, said his organization is
analyzing data on how Measure 11 has been
applied to youths since 1995 and expects to
publish a report later this spring.
When compared with county populations,
the data show that of Oregon’s four largest
counties, Multnomah has the highest rate of
using Measure 11 against juveniles - with
1,200 juveniles charged with Measure 11
crimes between 1995 and 2012. The
majority were kids of color.
PHOTO BY DIEGO DIAZ
Before his arrest, Keeshawn Bullitt was the teacher’s assistant in his high school dance class,
where he helped instruct beginners.
“What you see,” Singh said of his
preliminary findings, “is a disproportionate
use of Measure 11 against kids of color -
specifically black kids or African-American
kids.”
Statewide and in Multnomah County, kids
of color made up 66 percent of juveniles
charged under Measure 11 between 1995
and 2012, according to Oregon Justice
Resource Center data.
Second-degree robbery was most
frequently the severest Measure 11 charge
facing youths.
Street Roots’ examination of the 49
juvenile Measure 11 cases resolved in
Multnomah County in 2015 revealed 74
percent of defendants born in 1997 or later
were kids of color.
This trend continued with young adults,
with 69 percent of defendants between the
ages of 18 and 21 charged with Measure 11
in Multnomah County also being minorities.
In both age groups, black youths were
charged with Measure 11 more than any
other race.
The prosecutor on Bullitt’s case was
Elisabeth Waner. She said, “sympathy
factors” like age and prior criminal record
come into play later, when a plea deal is
offered. “It truly does come down to a
matter of legal sufficiency,” she said, and
her office is obligated to treat everyone
equally under the law.
She said because the boys committed the
robbery as a group and because there was a
knife involved, it qualified for both first- and
second-degree robbery charges.
Adding increased seriousness to a crime
because it was committed as a group - in
the case of teenagers - goes against what
we know about the teenage brain, said Lane
Borg, director of Metropolitan Public
Defenders.
Numerous studies over the past decade
have revealed increased risk-taking behavior
in teens is directly related to their
adolescent brain chemistry and that risk
taking behavior is heavily influenced by the,
presence of other teenagers.
In 2014, researchers in the psychology
department at Temple University published
a paper showing the perceived reward value
of risky behavior goes up in teenagers when
they are in the presence of their peers.
Additionally, one of the last parts of the
brain to fully mature is the area that weighs
long-term consequences and controls
impulses, according to National Institute of
Mental Health.
Borg remembers that when Measure 11
first passed, judges were shocked when they
saw cases involving kids who used guns and
knives when stealing beer or tennis shoes.
“The thinking was, ‘If these kids will go
to these lengths now, what will they do as
adults?”’ he said. “Given what we know now
- it’s stupid to call 18 ‘adult.’ We know using
a gun to get beer is more of an example of .
the impulsivity and irrationality of the
teenage brain.”
He said Oregon should reverse the way it
applies group behavior to criminal charges
when it comes to teenagers. Instead of
group behavior making a charge more
serious, he said the court should
acknowledge the group behavior more along
the lines of, “They were acting like idiot
teenagers and showing off.”
Borg said implicit bias likely plays a role
in the disproportionate rate at which black
and Latino youths are sent through the
adult system in Multnomah County.
Implicit bias, as opposed to explicit bias,
occurs outside of conscious awareness and
control. An ongoing study at Harvard,
Project Implicit, took bias scores from more
than 1.5 million Americans and determined
most white people demonstrate bias against
black people, even if they don’t know it.
This can come into play when a person
views a group of people of a race or ethnic
background other than their own. Implicit
bias, when left unchecked, can cause them
to perceive the group as acting together,
even when they are not.
Because being aided by another person
can be the difference between second and
third degree robbery - in other words,
between Measure 11 and non-Measure 11 -
Borg said the question of implicit bias
should be raised during questioning.
He said another key “is getting the
prosecutor and victim to be comfortable
that the intervention will solve the problem
- that the kid won’t do it again. When there
is a racial difference, it’s harder to identify
with the defendant.”
American Psychological Association
published a 2014 report suggesting black
boys are perceived as less innocence than
white boys.
The authors stated evidence showed
“Black boys are seen as older and less
innocent, and that they prompt a less
essential conception of childhood than do
their White same-age peers.”
One of the studies featured in the report
indicated that, beginning at age 10, there
are racial differences in assessments of
innocence. Test subjects indicated black
boys were more culpable of suggested
crimes, and when a felony crime was
suggested with a photograph, they
overestimated the age of black boys by more
than four years.
In 2008, sociologist Michael Kimmel
reported that middle-class white boys are
not held fully accountable for their actions
well into their 20s, but research suggests
black children may be viewed as adults when
they are as young as 13, leading the study’s
authors to conclude that “Black children
may be perceived as innocent only until
deemed suspicious.”
The Multnomah County District
Attorney’s Office employs three black
attorneys, representing 3.4 percent of its
prosecutors. In total, there are 15 minority
prosecutors, which means 83 percent of the
prosecutors are white.
While this may be roughly representative
of the county’s population, which is 76
percent white, the population processed
through the district attorney’s office is only
67 percent white, with 20 percent being
black, according to 2014 data analyzed by
the MacArthur Foundation.
'District Attorney Rod Underpin told
Street 'RobtkliYW
office plays a greater tdle iri sotfiSdi'ifie^1'
decision points than in others. The decision
to arrest an individual rests primarily with
law enforcement agencies.
“Neither the MacArthur report, nor the
actual data, answers the question of why
cases in which people of color are accused
of serious criminal activity are referred to
my office at a significantly higher (relative)
rate than those in which Caucasians are
similarly accused,” and that he “would like
to know more about the reasons
surrounding this troubling and persistent
issue.”
He said his office does not add to the
disparity because it moves forward on cases
against people of different racial and ethnic
groups at roughly the same rate, as shown
in the MacArthur Foundation’s report
But this doesn’t explain his office’s
propensity to charge black and Latino 15 to
17- year-olds as adults.
According to an Intelligence Report
written by the director of the Southern
Poverty Law Center’s Legal Department,
“Under American Law, government
prosecuting attorneys have nearly absolute
and unreviewable power to choose whether
or not to bring criminal charges and what
charges to bring.”
If Bullitt stays out of trouble and doesn’t
violate his probation, he’ll be able to
expunge his criminal record in three years.
However, his family worries the online
media reports will haunt him forever.
Because all Measure 11 cases are in adult
court, they are public record, as opposed to
juvenile cases, which are kept sealed. Both
KOIN and The Oregonian published stories
See JUVENILE, page 7