Children & the Law Blog

The St. Petersburg Times report When students are suspects, lines blur, Police in Florida sometimes go beyond their legal authority when interrogating suspects while they are in school, raises the specter of an all too common occurrence. As many commentators have noted, one of the unintended consequences of “zero tolerance” policies in schools has been the use of police to address the actions of children that once would have been dealt with teachers and principals.

Consider the story of one boy reported in the Times:

On the afternoon of Sept. 19, 2006, two deputies knocked on Andrea Macdowell’s front door and asked to see her 11-year-old son, Bryce. Standing on the porch of her Palm Harbor home, deputies accused the boy of spray-painting graffiti on a Dumpster. The mother told them they had been at a family gathering in Clearwater on the night of the crime. But a deputy didn’t buy it. “He said, ‘Your son is a (expletive) little punk,’” Macdowell recalled. “At that point I said, ‘We’re done.’ Bryce and I went inside and shut the door and they left. You don’t stand on my porch and degrade my son.”

The next day, the same officers — Cpl. Stanley Schneider and Deputy James Brueckner of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office — showed up at Palm Harbor Middle School and took Bryce to a small office. No school administrators were present, and a substitute school resource officer stood outside the room.Under pressure, Bryce made what deputies called a confession. They arrested him on misdemeanor charges of criminal mischief and took the boy to a juvenile detention center. Then they called his mother.

The judge threw out the confession and the case was dropped. It doesn’t always work out that way of course. Consider another disturbing statistic noted in the report - according to the Florida Supreme Court “[h]alf of all juveniles went without a lawyer in Pasco and Pinellas counties in 2005, as did three-quarters of those in Sarasota, Manatee and De Soto counties…”

Children who commit acts which would ordinarily be dealt with at school are now being processed through the legal system without the assistance of counsel at extraordinary rates. That’s a recipe for disaster. The criminal records generated here can follow them well into adult life. As one judge eloquently puts it -

“They won’t be able to get a job, they won’t be able to go to college,” said Judge Robert Evans of the 9th Judicial Circuit. “They’re screwed for life.”

• St. Petersburg Times: When students are suspects, lines blur, Police in Florida sometimes go beyond their legal authority when interrogating suspects while they are in school.
• James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, ‘Zero Tolerance’ Makes Zero Sense School discipline goes mad.
• Marsha L. Levick & Robert G. Schwartz, Changing the Narrative: Convincing Courts to Distinguish between Misbehavior and Criminal Conduct in School Referral Cases, 9 U. D.C. L. Rev. 53 (2007)
• Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (.pdf)
• Derailed: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (.pdf)