GILROY
– Juvenile court judges generally honor the decisions of local
police on whether arrested people under age 18 go home or to
Juvenile Hall, according to a leading county prosecutor.
But if police in some communities are more lenient than others,
is that just?
GILROY – Juvenile court judges generally honor the decisions of local police on whether arrested people under age 18 go home or to Juvenile Hall, according to a leading county prosecutor.
But if police in some communities are more lenient than others, is that just?
Three Gilroy High School students remain in Juvenile Hall nearly two weeks after one of them allegedly told 9-1-1 dispatchers on May 14 she had a gun at GHS and was going to shoot a teacher. It was a prank, police said, but one that prompted a frightening three-hour school lockdown.
Unless their judge changes his mind, these two girls and one boy will stay in custody until their case is resolved.
Their situation stands in stark contrast with that of a Saratoga student whom deputy Santa Clara County sheriffs caught with bomb-making chemicals Jan. 16. They released him to his parents the same day to be monitored with an electronic ankle bracelet.
Deputies told the Saratoga News they caught the 16-year-old fleeing the Saratoga High School campus at 2 a.m. after breaking into a chemistry lab and stealing bottles of glycerine and potassium nitrate. He had been storing other bomb-making chemicals in his bedroom, officers said.
“Why did those police go, ‘Oh, we don’t think he would really do anything,’ ” said Gilroy resident Dyanne Hofstad, who attends church with the family of one of the arrested Gilroy girls. “He had everything he needed to carry out the threat. That threat was so much more real (than the one at GHS).”
Hofstad pointed out that the Gilroy teens had no weapons with which to carry out their threat.
“I want to make sure that the consequences fit the crime,” she said.
The Saratoga boy’s release prompted a sharp, immediate and public criticism by Santa Clara County’s supervising juvenile prosecutor, Kurt Kumli. On Wednesday, Kumli said he still thinks the Saratoga decision was wrong and the Gilroy one was right.
“The Saratoga individual should have been arrested, booked and detained,” Kumli said. “The Gilroy Police Department, in arresting and booking these three individuals, absolutely did the right thing.”
Kumli also said that, in his mind, the Saratoga offense was more serious than the Gilroy one.
“Someone who had chemicals … who was in the act of breaking into the school – and a fairly sophisticated act at that, in the middle of the night – and comparing that with what happened in Gilroy, that disparity speaks for itself,” Kumli said.
Kumli said his office later asked the court to incarcerate the Saratoga boy, but a judge let him remain at home.
Although a prosecutor can ask a judge to incarcerate a free person and a defense attorney can ask for an incarcerated client to be freed, Kumli said these requests are rarely granted. He called it part of the “culture” of the court.
“Kids that get booked into Juvenile Hall generally stay in Juvenile Hall, and kids that get released generally stay released,” he said. “The court pays an extreme amount of deference to local law enforcement as to what’s best for … public safety.”
There are good reasons for this, Kumli said, but the result is not always fair.
Sheriff’s officials told the Saratoga News they chose to release the Saratoga boy because his parents took complete responsibility for him.
Kumli said this was reasonable of deputies but not necessarily right.
To explain, he gave a hypothetical example: two juveniles charged with the same crime, one from an upper-class Saratoga home, with a mother who stays at home, and the other from a less wealthy city, with a single mother who works three jobs.
In the first case, Kumli said, a parent can give the teen-ager 24-hour personal supervision and can afford counseling and other services for the child. Police see this and let the youth stay home.
In the second, he said, “Even though (the mother) loves her child every bit as much as the affluent parents do, she can’t afford to take time off work, she can’t afford the … services the other parents can.”
Seeing that this youth would be unsupervised if left at home, Kumli said police would take him or her to Juvenile Hall.
Both kids did the same wrong, but socio-economic differences keep one surrounded by family and the other surrounded by criminals. Such is the case nationwide, Kumli said.
“It goes from the police response through the prosecutors’ response, the court response, the probation response and, frankly, the community response.
“Politically, it is one of the primary components of the juvenile detention reform going on the county, and it is one of the hardest issues to address.”
On the other hand, Kumli said he was glad the court honored the GPD’s booking of the three Gilroy High students, and he praised the way Gilroy police “really have their fingers on the pulse” of the kind of justice Gilroyans expect.
As evidence, he noted a Dispatch Web poll in which 72 percent of voters said the three alleged death-threat pranksters should be tried as adults. Doing so is legally impossible, he said, but it “reflects the severity with which this community treats these actions.”
Hofstad agreed that death threats should not be tolerated but said the Gilroy students should be released from Juvenile Hall.
Juvenile court keeps all details of its cases confidential, but a source close to the Saratoga boy’s investigation said that last week, he “admitted” – the juvenile court equivalent of pleading guilty – to the charges against him. It is unknown what penalty he will face.
Deputies also arrested a 15-year-old female friend of the Saratoga student who allegedly left a message on a Saratoga High computer with graphic threats of harm to the principal. She too was released to her parents in response to her friend’s treatment.
The legal future of the three GHS teens is still up in the air. None can afford a private attorney, according to supervising juvenile public defender Sylvia Perez, so all three will have court-appointed attorneys to represent them.
Peter Crowley covers public safety for The Dispatch. You can reach him at pc******@gi************.com or 847-7216.
