Youth Court Night!

So the "highlight" of McCullum Youth Court, my new job, is Court Night. We usually have it twice a month, on Wednesday nights, at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland. In some ways, it was about as I expected; but in most ways, it was even better! :)

First of all, we've got some rock star attorneys (the attorneys, clerks, and bailffs are all youth--some of whom came through the program initially as an offender), and it was both cute and inspiring to see them up there arguing for or against the offender (these kids have pled guilty, so basically it's a sentencing hearing). Each youth juror gets to also ask 1-3 questions before going into deliberation.

Deliberation is awesome to watch. The kids take it seriously and totally get into defending and explaining their positions. Again, many of the jurors have come through as offenders, as one of the sentencing options they have is to require the offender to "volunteer" for 1-3 court nights on jury duty.

There's interesting sociological stuff going on in the deliberation room. I observed this boy's high school-age case (we have 4 courtrooms: 1 middle school, 1 high school girls, and 2 high school boys coz boys are, well, boys). This guy had been with a friend who'd waved around a replica of a handgun in a mom & pop store in Chinatown (Oakland). The young man is African-American.

As it so happened, the jury was split between 3 white kids and 3 black kids. One of the black kids had come through as an offender himself, and he basically wanted to throw the book at this guy. Wanted the maximum jury duty, maximum community service hours, maximum workshops to attend, etc.

These two white boys (probably from Piedmont), were all "progressive" and were arguing for the minimum sentence, saying the guy had basically been arrested for being Black in Chinatown. The truth, of course, was somewhere in between, and after much TORTURED negotiation, they reached an agreement.

One kid made me almost laugh out loud, coz as the two sides kept arguing over the number of hours of community service the boy should do, this juror kept insisting that the most logical, and fair, thing to do was to total up everyone's suggested hours and then divide by the number of jurors.

But the "hawk" on the juror then hiked his number to skew the results and when the Piedmont boys dropped theirs to zero, the hawk smugly pointed out that now he could just make a number that would then average out to whatever he wanted. I felt badly for logic boy. That kind of anal-retentive approach always appeals to me. :)

The other thing that was kind of a surprise, is I figured the youth offenders wouldn't be taking it so seriously, but they were seriously scared/worried. But of course I realized it WOULD be scary to be facing a group of your peers, firing questions at you, and holding your fate in their hands. This middle school boy was just terrified as the prosecuting attorney ripped into him for stealing a bike.

While there's some structural changes that need to be made at McCullum, and the culture needs to improve in some areas, I lucked out in that it's an awesome, awesome program that is having a serious impact on at-risk kids' lives at a critical juncture. Yay!