Florida leads the nation in direct filing; according to the Human Rights Watch, approximately 2,420 juvenile defendants were direct filed in Florida per year from 2008 to 2013. Unlike most states, in Florida, the prosecutor, instead of the judge, has sole discretion over whether or not a juvenile offender is direct filed.
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Read what Assistant Public Defender Tara Khani, the Chief of the Children’s Defense Division and Senior Supervising Attorney in South Florida, has to say about direct filing. Click to each question to read the response.
The juvenile justice delinquency system begins with a detention hearing. The detention hearing must occur within 24 hours of the child’s arrest. At the detention hearing, probable cause and custody is determined. After a detention hearing, soundings occur on the case which is the equivalent to an arraignment in adult court. A case can take many turns: it can be dismissed, it can be diverted out of court, a case can be set for an adjudicatory hearing (trial), or the case can be reviewed for direct file.
What is direct file? It is prosecutorial discretion which is a statutory power that allows prosecutors to decide whether to bring charges in juvenile or adult court. When a case is being reviewed for DF, the case is set 21 days from when the detention order is signed. Generally, by the 21st day, the State has decided as to whether keep the case in juvenile court or to have the case transferred to adult court. If the prosecutor has decided that the case is being direct filed, then the case will be transferred to adult court.
Direct File Process is discretionary in Florida. There is no mandatory direct file. The Statute was amended in 2019 to remove mandatory direct file. The direct file process is by statute 985.557. For any 14- or 15-year-old, direct file must be for one of the enumerated felonies. Prosecutors cannot direct file on a misdemeanor absent some rare exceptions. For 16- or 17-year-old, it is solely up to the discretion of the prosecutor to direct file any felony if public interest so requires. Under 14 years old, cannot use direct file as a mechanism to get a child into adult court. Florida Statute 985.565 lays out certain criteria that the Court will consider when imposing juvenile or adult sanctions in adult court. However, the State can consider the following factors when considering a case for direct file.
(1) Seriousness of the offense to the community and whether community would be best protected by juvenile or adult sanctions.
(2) Whether offense was committed in aggressive, violent, premeditated, or willful manner.
(3) Whether offense was against person vs. property
(4) The sophistication and maturity of the offender
(5) The record and previous history of the offender
(6) The prior contact with Department of Corrections, the
Department of Juvenile Justice, the Department of Children
and Families, law enforcement agencies, and the courts (7) Whether the Department of Juvenile Justice has
appropriate programs, facilities, and services immediately
available.
(8) Whether adult sanctions would provide more appropriate
punishment and deterrence than imposition of juvenile sanctions
Every study shows that prosecuting children as if they are adults have severe long-term consequences on the children, their families, their communities and society.Representing a child is different than representing an adult. Just like there are specialized courts for domestic cases, juvenile cases should be handled in courts that can deal with specific issues related to children. Adult courts are ill- equipped to have children processed through them – no rehabilitation, judges with no specialized knowledge about adolescent development or trauma, and an adult Corrections department that has zero expertise for how to best work with children to rehabilitate them rather than just punish them and warehouse them in state prison.
When a highly impressionable adolescent child is placed in an environment because their brains are still maturing and developing particularly in areas of reason or impulsivity, their environment will affect their future behavior and structure. Brains generally don’t stop developing until age 25. The psychological impact of direct filing a child and its implications are substantial. Long-term consequences: trauma to the child, increased recidivism in the future, and no real rehabilitation but rather punishment.
The juvenile justice system is supposed to focus on rehabilitation, and yet the threat of Direct File is used way too much to deny children the right to have a trial in juvenile court. There are studies including one conducted by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice which concluded that the transfer youth to the adult criminal
system is more likely to aggravate recidivism rather than to stop it. So, every time prosecutors Direct File a child, there is a huge risk that they will end up worse off than they were before. Sending children to adult court should be incredibly rare, but it is not. Therefore, our perspective is certainly that the balance is out of whack and often based more on punishment than rehabilitation. To the extent court involvement for children is necessary for “public safety” that societal involvement should decrease their chances of recidivism in the future. To do so would require resource-intensive interventions to actually help the child, like finding them a nice and safe place to live, providing them with therapy to deal with their trauma, and providing them with a top-level individualized educational plan if necessary. Instead, children end up in programs that are not always the right program at the right time for the child’s needs. It’s a very short-sighted system that entails too much of a cookie cutter one size fits all kind of programming.
Some states have completely done away with their direct file system or have drastically limited prosecutors’ authority to charge children in adult court without a judicial hearing. Those states are on the right track.
Direct file lacks oversight, when a prosecutor chooses to direct file a youth into the adult court system, in Florida, the prosecutor overrides the jurisdiction of the juvenile court without any input from the neutral factfinder, the judge. It lacks consistency, transparency and accountability and short-circuits justice because it can force children to take pleas to avoid being direct filed.
To reform, statutory discretion afforded to the prosecutor needs to be amended or altogether removed. The judge needs to have a role in these cases that are being reviewed for direct file. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.