Page 22 - Juvenile Practice is not Child's Play

impeachment avenues, prior bad acts, and all sorts of things upon which a jury will not look favorably. Ultimately, it is

not even your decision; the client has a right to testify. However, in your role as “counselor at law,” you have a duty to
counsel your client in the strongest terms as to your opinion regarding whether they testifies. Try to keep the officer
from testifying to hearsay in the adjudication hearing. This includes the use of notes. If the officer is using notes, try to

force them to use the “recollection recorded” or “refreshed recollection” exceptions to hearsay. These can help
emphasize to the jury that the officer was not able to remember the events, and in some situations can get you access to
notes that would otherwise be protected by the work-product privilege. For other hearings, the Rules of Evidence are
usually relaxed so that hearsay is admissible. If you think it is a particularly important issue, you can try to exclude it on

a Sixth Amendment right to confrontation basis.

Probation Officers
Probation officers can be very important to your case. Their opinion on disposition often carries significant
weight with the fact-finder. It is very important to talk with probation early on. Probation enters into a juvenile case

at the outset. If the youth is taken to detention, then probation will do an intake interview. Depending on the county,
probation may make the determination of whether to charge a youth. Most of the time, probation will do an interview
with the parents and child. They will use this interview to prepare a report for the court. Note that
probation officers should not be testifying in adjudication hearings. Keep them off the stand until disposition.

Experts
You may have the same range of experts in a juvenile case that you would in a criminal case. For most experts, there
will not be a significant difference in how they do their job. A ballistics expert will not be impacted by the age of the

defendant. Mental health professionals are a different story. Mental health professionals need specialized training to be
able to adequately diagnose or examine children and adolescents. In fact, expert witnesses should possess special
certification or licensure. Not only do they need to have appropriate training and credentials, but the tests that they use
must also be designed to be used with children or adolescents. An example of this necessity can be seen in one of the

tests for psychopathy designed for adults. In this test, one of the indicators for a psychopathic personality is that the
person still lives with their parents, which is obviously no such indication for a child. There are also certain diagnoses,
such as personality disorder, that are usually reserved for people over the age of 18. If there is a diagnosis made, don’t
merely accept it. Review it. Diagnosis should be based on the DSM V. This book is recognized by most of the mental

health professionals in the nation as the learned treatise on Mental Disorders. The DSM lists what symptoms need to
be present for a diagnosis to be assigned and what other disorders need to be ruled out. Also, look to see if any tests
were used to make the diagnosis. If the expert used a test, is it a reliable test that was designed for adolescents or
children?

When investigating experts, make sure to pay attention to their backgrounds. Look at where they went to school. Look
at the groups that certify forensic experts in the field of the expert. Almost every conceivable group of experts has an