Saturday, July 16, 2011

Have an intelligent, non emotional opinion?

in a nutshell....adult criminal records are public and juvenile criminal (or 'adjudication') records are private. this results in denial of employment for adults with criminal backgrounds yet not juveniles who later become adults and apply for employment. That's not the issue tho. The issue is whether or not a constitutional claim could be successfully litigated challenging a state's decision to make juvenile criminal records exempt under the public records act when the same state allows the public access to juvenile sex offenders records(they have to report and notifications go out just like adults). If a state wants to keep juvenile criminal records sealed which basically means they can later apply for employment without having to worry about a background check exposing what they did as a juvenile for whatever reason they 'claim' then great, but how do they justify making an exception regarding juvenile sex offenders? If they are going to make exceptions then obviously the original reason behind sealing juvenile records is now shattered by their statute requiring juvenile sex offenders to report just like adult offenders. shouldn't the state now be required to make public all juvenile serious offenders' records? If not, wouldn't this constitute an equal protection violation because adult offender records are public and the state's position regarding the original intent behind sealing juvenile records via the enactment of a statute requiring juvenile serious sex offenders to report just like adult offenders won't hold up now? I think this would be a good case to entertain in federal court.......at the very least perhaps the judicial circuit I'm in may order some type of study to be conducted (I participated in a study created by a federal judicial circuit regarding the grievance policy of a state (all the states within that circuit) which they were going to attempt to adopt for that circuit in relation to the federal law requiring prisoners to first utilize the prison grievance procedure before filing civil actions) but your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

No comments:

Post a Comment