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43 Crime & Delinquency 3 (1997)

handle is hein.journals/cadq43 and id is 1 raw text is: Necessarily Relative: Is Juvenile Justice Speedy Enough? Jeffrey A. Butts Despite 30 years of expanding procedural rights for juveniles, young offenders have not been provided with a constitutional right to a speedy trial. Yet concerns about timeliness are often equally pressing in the juvenile court. This study examines the timing ofjuvenile justice by analyzing delinquency case processing in nearly 400 jurisdictions. One fourth of all cases required 90 days or more to reach disposition-the maximum recommended by national standards. Processing time varied according to jurisdiction size, the rate of formal adjudications, and other characteristics of juvenile court caseloads. The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a speedy and public trial for any citizen subjected to criminal prosecution. The amendment does not stipulate what is and what is not speedy. In its definitive case on speedy trial, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to specify exactly when delay becomes a violation of Sixth Amendment rights (Barker v. Wingo 1972). The Court cited an earlier opinion in finding that the concept of speedy trial is necessarily relative and should not be defined precisely (Barker v. Wingo 1972, p. 522). The Supreme Court never addressed the question of speedy trial rights for juveniles. Traditionally, processing delays have not been a serious concern in the juvenile court, in part because the juvenile justice system has fewer procedural requirements. In recent years, however, concerns about delays in juvenile justice have become more common among judges, practicing attor- JEFFREY A. BUTTS: Senior Research Associate, National Center for Juvenile Justice, Pittsburgh, PA. This article was prepared as part of the Delays in Juvenile Justice Sanctions Project at the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ), the research division of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and was supported by grant 92-JN-CX-0002 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), U.S. Department of Justice. Several NCJJ staff members assisted with the study, including Gregory Halemba, Imogene Montgomery, Hunter Hurst IV, Diane Malloy, and Linda Szymanski. The author is grateful for the comments and suggestions of William H. Barton, Edmund McGarrell, Joseph B. Sanborn, Jr., and Melissa Sickmund. Points of view or opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and do not represent the official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, or the National Center for Juvenile Justice. CRIME & DELINQUENCY, Vol. 43 No. 1, January 1997 3-23 @ 1997 Sage Publications, Inc. 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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