Juvenile Initiative: Kids & Wrongful Conviction

The goal of IPNO's Juvenile Initiative is to represent wrongfully convicted youth sentenced to life without parole in Louisiana and use their cases to urge reform of a criminal justice system that too often treats children no differently from adults.

By litigating cases of wrongfully convicted juveniles, IPNO highlights the flaws in a system that disproportionately harms youth. Using the lessons learned from cases of wrongful convictions, the Initiative seeks to cultivate a culture change in the way youth are treated in the criminal justice system. Louisiana - with the highest rate of juveniles serving life without parole (LWOP) in the world - has a tremendous need for a voice for these youth. The Initiative is exposing the risks associated with trying children in an adult system that lacks any protections for youth and subjects them to mandatory LWOP sentences.

IPNO carefully screens all of the applications received from youth who have been sentenced to LWOP. These cases are handled by the Juvenile Initiative attorney, Kristin Wenstrom. Wenstrom is currently working on seven cases in which the defendant was convicted and sentenced to LWOP for a crime that occurred when he was a teenager.

IPNO's work to date has provided compelling evidence that teenagers facing criminal charges in the adult system are particularly vulnerable to wrongful conviction, due to factors such as:

• Lack of awareness of rights at the police station;
• Failure to provide the police with a full account of an alibi due to their inability to realize the importance of this information;
• Heightened susceptibility to police pressure and therefore higher incidence of false confessions;
• Inability to understand or exercise their rights in court and
• Defense attorneys who are not trained to deal with young clients.

When a young person is accused of a crime, often the witnesses involved in the case are young as well. Many of the characteristics of youth that cause them to be vulnerable to pressure from authorities also cause them to be unreliable witnesses. They are susceptible to making false accusations of others because they do not fully appreciate the gravity of the situation or the consequences of providing false information to the police. In addition, teenage alibi witnesses often are unable to provide a consistent account of where the defendant was at the time of the crime.

It is not surprising then, that juveniles are disproportionately represented among the wrongfully convicted: six of Louisiana's 25 exonerees. This means nearly a quarter of Louisiana's exonerees were in prison for crimes that occurred when they were under the age of 18.

To learn more about IPNO clients who were teenagers when they were arrested, please see the cases of Travis Hayes, Earl Truvia, and Dennis Brown.