Sample Petition For Adult Adoption Georgia: Fill & Download for Free

No. As a juvenile, he is not legally competent to waive his rights.The better question is whether an adult who cooperates in publicizing his personal story waives confidentiality in his juvenile record. The answer is: not necessarily.To understand the answer, it is necessary to understand some basics about juvenile delinquency proceedings, court records and privacy rights.BackgroundIn his famous 1890 essay, The Right to Privacy, Right to Privacy, Louis Brandeis saw privacy as the foundation of individual freedom. While the Constitution does not contain an explicit right to privacy, Brandeis argued the law must protect privacy to protect the “right to one’s personality” in light of the increasing technological capacity of government and the press to expose our private lives. Otherwise, we become victims of a “too enterprising press, the photographer, or the possessor of any other modern device for rewording or reproducing scenes or sounds.”Nearly thirty years later sitting on the Supreme Court, Brandeis penned his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) and stressed the critical importance of privacy which he characterized as the “right to be let alone.” He regarded it as “the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.”We don’t hold children responsible for their crimes. Thus, the law cloaks juvenile records to protect children, and to allow adults previously adjudicated as juvenile delinquents “to be let alone,” free from the stigma of their childhood misdeeds.Open Court Records vs. Closed Juvenile RecordsEvery state has juvenile courts which try cases for children under a specified age, typically eighteen. Such cases are called “delinquency proceedings." They mirror adult criminal proceedings but are deemed civil in nature, not criminal, because their purpose is rehabilitation and treatment, not punishment and social retribution.Judges, not juries, decide delinquency cases because, unlike adults, juveniles do not have a constitutional right to jury trials. McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, 403 U.S. 528 (1971).In the United States, the people are sovereign, government derives its power from the people, and courts are an arm of government. Thus, open courts help insure we have informed self-government.The principle applies to both criminal and civil cases. In Gannett v. DePasquale, 443 U.S. 368, 386 n.15 (1979) the Supreme Court declared that, in “some civil cases the public interest in access, and the salutary effect of publicity, may be as strong as, or stronger than, in most criminal cases.” Likewise, in Presley v. Georgia, 558 U.S. 209 (2010), the Supreme Court declared, “The public has a right to be present [in court] whether or not any party has asserted the right.”That said, while the public cannot be excluded from a criminal trial, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555 (1980), it does not have an absolute right to all court records and proceedings in all cases. Access may be constitutionally restricted where an especially compelling interest is at stake.One such compelling interest is protecting the privacy of juveniles. Publicity exposes juvenile defendants to stigma and emotional trauma. For that reason, most states impose either a full or partial ban on public access to juvenile delinquency records.However, the rule is not absolute and has eroded over the years. Decades ago, a New York Family Court judge opened a closed delinquency proceeding to a reporter who had been barred from the courtroom. The judge based her decision on the “structural role of the First Amendment in our system of government,” noting that the “public interest in judicial proceedings is hardly limited to criminal proceedings.” Matter of Chase, No. 446 N.Y.S.2d 1000, 1002-03, (N.Y.Fam.Ct., 1982).In 1995, the National Council of Juvenile & Family Court Judges issued a report entitled Children and Family First: A Mandate for America's Courts which stated,“Traditional notions of secrecy and confidentiality should be re-examined and relaxed to promote public confidence in the court's work. The public has a right to know how courts deal with children and families.”See, Emily Bazelon, Public Access to Juvenile and Family Court: Should the Courtroom Doors Be Open or Closed?, 18 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 155 (1999).As a result, some states modified their laws to provide greater access to juvenile trials and court records. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press publishes a state-by-state guide to these laws: https://www.rcfp.org/wp-content/uploads/imported/SJAJJ.pdf. Thirty-eight states now permit access to most delinquency proceedings. The report notes the“tension between the public’s interest in providing oversight of an institution [the Juvenile Court] that adjudicates children’s matters and its interest in rehabilitating and protecting its most vulnerable from lasting stigma and emotional trauma.”The Information Age Has Spawned a Privacy CrisisIn the past, court files were “public” in name only. In practical terms, they were inaccessible to the average person. To access them required:the name of the case or partytravel to the courthouse where the case was heardlocating the specific record, sometimes in offsite storagecopying it which required paying a feeToday, we live in the Information Age made possible by personal computers and the Internet. Most court records are online. Anyone with a personal computer can search across jurisdictions to find the legal history of almost anyone. As such, courts are no longer mere custodians of their records; they have become publishers of such records via their file servers.In addition, data aggregators like Lexis/Nexis, Acxiom, ChoicePoint, and the major credit bureaus, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian, mine court records for personal information which is then meshed with other data to create dossiers on nearly every American. Fred H. Cate, Government Data Mining: The Need for A Legal Framework, 43 Harv. Civ. Rts. Civ. Lib. L. Rev. 435, 457 (2008).In short, the Information Age has spawned a privacy crisis. In the words of Prof. David S. Ardia,“courts are a stage where many of life's dramas are performed, where people may be shamed, vindicated, compensated, punished, judged, or exposed. [Therefore], it should come as no surprise that court records, which serve as a chronicle of these dramas, are littered with private and sensitive information about the litigants, witnesses, jurors, and others who come voluntarily or involuntarily into contact with the court system.”Privacy and Court Records: Online Access and the Loss of Practical Obscurity, 2017 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1385.Juvenile Records in the Information AgeNearly every state photographs and fingerprints juveniles, and many take DNA samples. Records created by the arrest, trial and sentencing of a child do not live in a courthouse clerk's file alone. They are also kept by prosecutors, probation officers, social services agencies, schools, housing authorities, and mental health facilities. They are sent to state information repositories. They do not go away.State laws vary regarding protection of these records. Some provide robust protection; some only partial protection; and a few provide no protection at all. For example,“Several states make all juvenile records accessible on public websites. Florida and Idaho publish juvenile adjudications online allowing free access. In Maine and Nebraska, a person willing to pay a small fee can access juvenile records. For example, in Nebraska, all records, including juvenile records, are kept together in a public online database. For some offenses, the press can request juvenile charging information and print the names of juveniles charged in juvenile courts. And many juvenile courts are open to the public, allowing information about charges and adjudications to be shared with anyone, including a reporter.... The United States now disclos[es] more juvenile offender information than most other countries or international standards allow.”Prof. Joy Radice, The Juvenile Record Myth, 106 Geo. L.J. 365 (2018).Unsealing Juvenile RecordsMost states have procedures to seal or expunge juvenile records. Sealing means paper records are kept in designated safes or locked cabinets inaccessible to the public and digital records are kept offline.Expungement creates a legal fiction. It means the juvenile's court record never existed and the juvenile offender legally can advise third parties he never committed any crime, even though he was adjudicated a delinquent for his crime.Legally, expungement removes the taint of conviction for other purposes. For example, § 922(g) of the federal Gun Control Act prohibits anyone convicted of a felony, drug offense, or domestic violence from possessing a gun. However, a delinquency adjudication is not a disqualifying offense, and under 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(20), “Any conviction which has been expunged ... shall not be considered a conviction for purposes of this chapter.”Use of Juvenile Records in Criminal CasesIn some jurisdictions, courts are forbidden from considering a defendant's juvenile crimes when sentencing him as an adult. In other jurisdictions, juvenile records can be unsealed for specified purposes. For example, a probation officer tasked to write a pre-sentence report can petition to unseal a defendant's juvenile record in order to provide the sentencing court with a complete picture of the defendant’s criminal history.The American Law Institute drafts model acts for states to adopt. Under Model Juvenile Court Act § 33(b), evidence from a juvenile proceeding may not be used in a subsequent court proceeding except for a pre-sentence report on a defendant convicted of a felony.Bottom line: Being the subject of media reports, even courting such publicity, does not negate one’s privacy rights in juvenile records. Why, for example, should an adult athlete or musician with a delinquency record forfeit his right to privacy by consenting to be interviewed or photographed about his success on the playing field or concert arena?On the other hand, our celebrity-obsessed culture drives some people to debase themselves on so-called reality television shows and live out loud on social media, often exposing the most intimate details about their private lives.In such cases, a prosecutor could argue that a competent adult who voluntarily exposed his delinquency case to the press or social media waived confidentiality in his juvenile record. Once he has exposed himself, the public no longer has any interest in protecting him, but it does have an abiding interest in open access to courts and their records.However, whether that argument would prevail depends entirely on how the courts in a given state construe its laws governing the confidentiality of juvenile delinquency records.