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Life Without Possibility of Parole for Children
The Children and Family Justice Center is a founding member of the Illinois Coalition For Fair Sentencing of Children, a group of attorneys, academics, child advocates, and concerned citizens who are pursuing judicial, legislative, and other avenues designed to end the practice of sentencing children under the age of 18 to life without the possibility of parole in Illinois.
On February 13, 2008 the Illinois Coalition For Fair Sentencing of Children with the support of the US Human Rights Fund and the Libra Foundation released “Categorically Less Culpable: Children Sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole in Illinois.” The report offers an extensive and unprecedented look at the lives of the 103 Illinoisans serving life sentences without possibility of parole that they received as children.
Visit the website to learn more about the sentence of life without possibility of parole for children as well as our coalition
View the report: “Categorically Less Culpable: Children Sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole in Illinois” (pdf)
Juvenile Criminal Justice
The Children and Family Justice Center in collaboration with the National Juvenile Defender Center with the support of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Models for Change Initiative just released the Illinois Assessment of Access to Counsel & Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings, a comprehensive examination of the scope and quality of legal representation received by children accused of committing delinquent acts throughout Illinois. The report's findings and recommendations are intended to stimulate discussion about the strengths and deficiencies in Illinois' juvenile indigent defense system. It is hoped that this report will serve as a tool for juvenile defense attorneys, policy makers, and leaders in juvenile justice to change the nature and structure of Illinois' juvenile indigent defense system.
Illinois Assessment of Access to Counsel & Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings (pdf)
Illinois Assessment Executive Summary (pdf)
The CFJC plays a significant role in reforming the world's first and oldest Juvenile Court founded in Cook County in 1899. The center has participated in efforts to strengthen the court's rehabilitative rather than punitive approaches for work with juveniles and families, reduce court intake and case filings, support the court's efforts to reduce the population of the juvenile detention center and expand alternatives to detention, help devise an information evaluation system for the court, design a system to improve the quality of court ordered psychosocial evaluations of juveniles, assure greater rights for children and identify programs that keep them out of the juvenile justice system, recruit and retain excellent judges, attorneys, and professionals, eliminate racial, ethnic, and gender bias, and involve communities in juvenile and criminal court alternatives.
School Law
The CFJC provides legal assistance to keep students enrolled in and attending school. Many children and families who become involved with the discipline system at public schools do not understand their rights or how to protect themselves. Center attorneys, social workers, law students, and volunteers have worked on many of these issues, including the use of zero tolerance measures in place of individualized discipline, rampant exercise of suspensions and expulsions instead of more restorative discipline measures such as peer mediation and peer juries, failure to provide a student and family a chance to present their account of the facts, extreme punishments, such as school-based arrests, for sometimes minor infractions, unequal application of rules and regulations, inconsiderate treatment of parents during discipline proceedings, failure to consider in-school options for punishment of students rather than the extreme measures of expulsion, and the failure to give educators the discretion to decide appropriate sanctions for violations of school rules.
Children's Law Pro Bono Project
The CFJC recruits, trains, and supervises volunteer attorneys to represent juveniles in delinquency trials and to help children being expelled or suspended from the Chicago Public Schools. Since the project began, more than 200 attorneys from 30 prominent Chicago firms have participated. These volunteers have helped families of kids in trouble find their way through the juvenile court system and devised creative solutions to their legal problems.
In school expulsion cases, a little legal advice goes a long way (pdf)
Immigration and Children
The CFJC offers legal representation to children and youth seeking asylum in immigration proceedings, advocacy in state abuse and neglect proceedings, and assistance in filing applications for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status relief and lawful immigration status pursuant to the Violence Against Women Act.
The center is particularly concerned with the status of unaccompanied child refugees. Some 5,000 unaccompanied children enter the U.S. each year and are detained by the Department of Homeland Security. They rarely have access to lawyers, and they have frequently been traumatized by war and civil strife, torture, and violence. The center has been involved in training attorneys, developing policy, speaking and writing and working with national advocates to improve the treatment and legal rights of these child refugees, including hosting training sessions like one held in the summer of 2001 at the Law School in which nearly 300 volunteer attorneys were certified to represent unaccompanied children.
Through a fellowship sponsored by Equal Justice Works, the center also focuses on Convention Against Torture relief for children. In conjunction with this project, a Web site has been created to assist advocates representing children seeking asylum and CAT relief: Children and the Convention Against Torture: Resources for Advocates.
International Human Rights Law and Children
The CFJC works closely with organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to promote the welfare and well being of children in every country, as well as compliance with international law within the United States by working on issues such as the juvenile death penalty,
violence against children, child soldiers, child refugees and children seeking asylum, children with HIV-AIDS and AIDs orphans, development of effective and humane systems of juvenile justice, and conditions of confinement. Upcoming programming in March 2006 will include "Children Seeking Asylum in the U.S." More information will be posted.
Juvenile Death Penalty
The CFJC played an integral role in the movement that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision to end the practice of executing juvenile offenders. Five years ago, CFJC attorneys, including Bernardine Dohrn, Lauren Adams and Steve Drizin, began working with Northwestern Law students and a core group of other individuals and organizations to create a strategy that would convince the Supreme Court to revisit the juvenile death penalty only 15 years after it last ruled on the issue.
Key aspects of the strategy included framing the issue as one of adolescent development and highlighting the extent to which the United States’ practice was at odds with the rest of the world. Steven Drizin co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of 50 child advocacy organizations which highlighted the developmental issues and Lauren Adams and Tom Geraghty co-wrote an amicus brief on behalf of 15 former Nobel Laureates, which underscored the human rights and international aspects of the strategy.
