Illustration by Kai Henthorn-Iwane
California Senate Bill (SB) 395, a new law protecting children in police custody, went into effect on January 5. Authored by State Senator Michael Lara and approved by Governor Jerry Brown on October 11, 2017, the bill aims to help prevent juveniles from giving up their Miranda Rights and making false confessions in custody.
SB 395 stops children fifteen years old or younger from waiving their access to legal advice, and consultations are to be made available in person, by telephone, or by video conference.
Law enforcement officers are still able to take minors into custody with reasonable cause, but cannot interrogate them before they have an opportunity to speak to a lawyer.
SB 395 is part of the Equity and Justice package of six bills co-authored by Senators Michael Lara and Holly Michael that implement bipartisan reform of California’s criminal justice system. The bills propose ending requirements for innocent defendants to reimburse the courts for appointing attorneys, updating Miranda Rights, and allowing parole for youth offenders. According to Lara’s website, the bills were introduced in response to information about youth resiliency and the negative impact of incarceration on young people.
“[The laws] are a major step toward rehabilitation and preventing incarceration for young people,” said Michael Soller, Communications Director for Senator Lara. Soller said that for years, Lara has heard about young people giving false confessions during interrogations and then being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.
According to Soller, Lara believes young people are especially susceptible to pressure and are more likely to confess to a crime they did not commit than adults. A particular incident that moved Lara to introduce the bill was hearing the testimony of a young man who confessed to a crime he did not commit after being held by Oakland police without an attorney for nearly 25 hours in 1990.
Headquartered in San Francisco, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) is a non-profit organization that advocates for criminal justice reform and the reduced use of incarceration as a solution to social problems. CJCJ Executive Director Daniel Macallair said that his organization supports SB 395 along with many other social justice and civil rights groups because it protects youth against unfair practices during police interrogations. Macallair believes that interrogation tactics often involve convincing youth to admit guilt with a promise everything will be fine afterward.
“In too many instances, youth end up incriminating themselves even when they are innocent because they want to go home or they are scared and want to tell the police what they want to hear,” Macallair said.
Kate Weisburd is the Director and Clinical Instructor at the Youth Defender Clinic, a project of the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC). Her clinic represents youth in delinquency, school discipline and special education proceedings in Alameda County. Weisburd said that SB 395 recognizes that kids respond to interrogation differently than adults.
“Children often don’t understand all the possible implications of speaking to a police officer about a crime that they may know something about,” Weisburd said. She continued, “Many kids don’t know that they have the right to say ‘no’ to talking to the police.” Weisburd said she has worked with minors who gave up their Miranda Rights without being properly informed:“Many of the young people I’ve represented made statements to the police that ended up hurting their case.”
Macallair thinks that SB 395 will help reduce the number of innocent youth who are caught in the juvenile justice system because they don’t understand the full implications of what information they share and how it could be used against them.
According to Macallair, one CJCJ case in which a child gave up their Miranda Rights involved a six-year-old who was accused of a serious crime, read his Miranda Rights by a police officer, and then questioned. Macallair said that many adults don’t understand these rights, and no six-year-old does.
He said, “[SB 395] will eliminate the unfairness of having youth interrogated by police without adequate understanding of dangers of saying things or making statements that could be used to find them guilty of things they did not do.”
Soller said that Senator Lara is committed to rehabilitating young people and preventing them from entering the adult criminal justice system. “Early intervention is so important to keep young people in school and on track, and [Lara] will continue to introduce important legislation to fix our juvenile justice system,” Soller said.
SB 395 requires the governor or their designee to convene a panel of experts to analyze the outcomes associated with SB 395 by January 1, 2023 and to report their findings to the governor and legislature by April 2024. The bill will expire in 2025, but the state legislature can vote to codify its provisions permanently before then.
To Weisburd, SB 395 is an important criminal justice reform. She expressed the wish that additional longterm policy changes regarding police interaction with minors are introduced in California in the future.