Gault Case Summary

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Gault’s parents brought a habeas corpus action in the state courts to challenge the constitutionality of the Arizona Juvenile Code and the procedure used in Gerald’s case, arguing that Gault was denied various procedural due process rights. The State Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of the writ. While it agreed that the constitutional guarantee of due process applies to proceedings in which juveniles are charged as delinquents, the court held that the Arizona Juvenile Code impliedly includes the requirements of due process in delinquency proceedings and that such due process requirements were not offended by the procedure leading to Gerald’s commitment. With this decision due process would be extended to juveniles. “The Annual Conference of …show more content…
In 1964, juvenile court Judge Robert E. McGhee had sentenced 15-year-old Gerald Gault, who was accused of making an obscene phone call, to serve an indeterminate sentence at the state’s juvenile reformatory. Thus, Gerald could potentially spend six years in prison. By contrast, an adult who committed the same crime could have received only a maximum sentence of 60 days in jail and have been ordered to pay a $50 fine. Norman Dorsen, who litigated Gault for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), considered the case the logical extension of Gideon. After the court announced its decision in Kent, Dorsen never doubted that the Supreme Court, during this revolutionary era of extending due process protections, would determine that juveniles had the right to assistance of counsel during juvenile court trials. At the beginning of his oral argument before the high court, Dorsen meticulously walked the justices through the informal legal process that ultimately led to Gerald’s incarceration at the Arizona Industrial” (Tanenhaus, 2016). This case showed how disproportionate the system was for juveniles compared to adult offenders. It basically showed how failed the current juvenile system was in the handling of juvenile cases and the mistreatment of their …show more content…
Dorsen explained that Gerald could potentially be incarcerated for six years, whereas an adult could have been sentenced to only 60 days in jail and fined. He had confirmed Fortas’s damning critique of modern juvenile justice in Kent. Warren assigned Fortas to write the Court’s majority opinion in Gault. The most remarkable feature of Fortas’s exceptionally long opinion was his use of social science, including drawing from the recently released Report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), to condemn the modern juvenile court as an ineffective and ill-equipped institution that severely punished young offenders. Significantly, the Gault decision put to rest the legal fiction that juvenile courts only protected but did not punish children. During oral argument, for example, Fortas flatly rejected the distinction built into the progressive paradigm that classified juvenile offenses as “delinquency” instead of crime. Fortas viewed this issue from the perspective of an incarcerated juvenile” (Tanenhaus, 2016). This at the time was one of the most important pieces of expanding civil liberties and rights to juveniles. This court decision showed how terrible the system was in treating juveniles. The court cases also revealed how far back states were in the treatment of
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