Delinquency Cases Waived to Criminal Court, 2009

• NCJ Number: 239080
• Author(s): Benjamin Adams M.S.; Sean Addie J.D.
• Date Published: October 2012
• Length: 4 pages
• Publication Series: OJJDP National Report Series
• Grant Number(s): 2010– JR– FX– 0031
• Agencies: OJJDP
• Publication Type: Factsheet

Annotation

This report from the Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, presents information on the number of delinquency cases waived to criminal court during 2009.

Abstract

Findings from this analysis of the number of delinquency cases waived to criminal court in 2009 include the following: 1) 45 States have discretionary judicial waiver provisions that allow judges to move individual juvenile cases to criminal adult courts, while 15 States have presumptive waiver laws that allow certain categories of cases to be moved to adult criminal courts; 2) since 1994, the number of cases waived to criminal court has declined by 45 percent; and 3) 55 percent of the 1.5 million delinquency cases handled that year requested an adjudication or waiver hearing, with 1 percent of the petitioned cases resulting in a judicial waiver. Additional findings include in 2009, 1.7 percent of person offense cases were waived compared to 1.1 percent of drug offense cases; in 2009, the most common cases judicially waived for males were person offense cases, compared to drug offense cases for females; and in 2009, person and drug offense cases involving Black youth remained slightly more likely to be judicially waived than those involving white youth. Data for this analysis were obtained from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) report entitled Juvenile Court Statistics 2009, which is available on OJJDP's Web site. Figures and table