Teen Court: Contextualizing Justice
I’m lucky to live in an area of Texas that has the Teen Court Program, a volunteer program where teenagers can serve as jury members or attorneys for juveniles who have committed Class C misdemeanors. In these roles, we can sentence juveniles to community service hours for their infractions. The program has not only given me valuable experiences with being part of courtroom procedures, but it’s also helped me to realize all the complexities that go into determining justice and its consequences.
My first court session was much more eventful than most, with the defendant having run away from home before the trial. Instead of wondering what circumstances could have led the child to do something so drastic, the other jurors and I were quick to judge him and complained about how we had wasted an hour of our evening waiting for someone who wouldn’t show up. Ever since I was little, I’ve always been a stickler for punctuality, a trait that made me a reliable older sister, but one that also made me a little less than understanding when situations like that arose. We were later told that the kid ran away from home to avoid the shame of having to go to court, but our sympathies had run dry by the 20-minute wait mark.
That specific trial was pushed to another date, and in its place was a speeding case. A 17-year-old had been going 75 miles per hour in a school zone in the middle of broad daylight, so all of us jury members took great delight in assigning one community service hour for every mile that they had been over the speed limit, 55 hours in total.
This trial specifically made me interested in being a Teen Court attorney, and a prosecutor at that.
Based on the trials I had seen up to that point, it seemed like the kids who liked doing reckless things like speeding in school zones and drinking underage were a majority of the ones on trial, and so I thought that the role of a prosecuting attorney would be somewhat straightforward and enjoyable to do, but my opinion changed with another case I witnessed as a jury member.
The defendant in this case was a young boy, around 11 years old, but looked no older than 8 or 9. Wearing a suit too long for his arms and legs, he shook as he walked up to the stand, so small that we could barely see him above the partition. His voice trembled as he stated his name for the court, and all I could think was, “Who would put such a little kid on trial?”
The defense counsel asked simple, short questions, gradually revealing the situation: the boy had gotten into a fight after another child insulted him and his family. In retaliation, he had thrown a handful of sand at the bully and now stood trial, terrified he might go to jail. We couldn’t even laugh at his misunderstanding; we were too bewildered by how seriously the situation had escalated.
The prosecuting attorney on this case was known for being one of the best in the program, but in this trial, she couldn’t perform up to standard as she tried to make the kid feel as comfortable as he could in that situation, and who could blame her? When I first got the idea of taking on the role of a prosecuting attorney in teen court, I only thought of the useless fights and speeding cases. I never imagined that I would have to deal with a case where I would have to find a way to give a little kid as many community service hours as possible for the infraction of throwing a fistful of sand at a playground bully. And herein was the problem: I saw the justice system as a way to punish the guilty, instead of it being a way to look beyond the surface and consider the full context behind people's actions and decisions, advocating for a verdict that would match the crime and intent.
Cases like this have forced me to rethink not only my role in Teen Court but also the kind of lawyer and the kind of person I hope to become: someone who can see both sides of a situation and uses that understanding to advocate for justice in a way that is both compassionate and fair.
