The Elimination Argument, Part 2: Juvenile Offenders Cannot Go to CC

Abstract

Chapter 9 deals with the part of the anti-transfer crowd (ATC) campaign that argues juvenile offenders cannot go to criminal court (CC) for two reasons. The first is the ATC claim that the best interests (BI) of juvenile offenders must always prevail, which, impliedly, means transfer can never occur. This Chapter reveals how both segments of the sentence are incorrect. Nowhere in JC history has any reasonable authority asserted that the juveniles' BI were sacrosanct and that all offenders must be prosecuted in JC. Also ironic is that there are occasions in which the juveniles' BI would be served by transfer. The second alleged obstacle is that juveniles, en masse, are incompetent to stand trial (IST) due to the same characteristics we saw in Chapter 8 that were engineered to establish their lesser culpability. Chapter 9 debunks this contention, including a thorough critique of the concepts and research relied upon by the ATC to make their claim.