Views By Two Series
Hon. Maria Hernandez & Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman
present
“Juvenile Justice in Orange County:
Differential Effects of Varied Levels of System Involvement”
Please join us for the first event in our new Views By Two series. This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP here by January 30th. This event has been approved for 1 MCLE credit.
Date:
Monday, February 2nd, 2015
Time:
5:30-7:00pm
Location:
University of California, Irvine Campus
Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway building, room 1517 (#217 on campus map)
For directions and maps, click here.
Abstract:
Judges, Probation Officers, and District Attorneys are tasked with evaluating cases of suspected juvenile offending and determining which youth to channel into the justice system and which to divert from formal processing. How do they make this decision? How should they make this decision? In spite of the widely varying costs of different justice system outcomes, there is very little research examining the factors that juvenile justice professionals consider when making these determinations. There is even less empirical research aimed at informing these decisions and those of other justice system arbiters in order to maximize benefits and limit long term costs to society. As a result, juvenile case processing is characterized by inconsistency, even within a single state. Judge Hernandez will discuss the current practices and policies that are being used within the Orange County Juvenile Court, as well as the challenges that the court system faces. Dr. Cauffman will share findings from her ongoing research study, the Crossroads study. This study aims to create an empirical foundation for developing decision-making guidelines for juvenile justice professionals that serve the best interest of the community, the taxpayers, and delinquent youths. This research addresses the long-term impact of varying degrees of court processing on youth development, specifically for youth processed in the Orange County Juvenile Justice System. Findings will be presented for three groups of adolescents who began the study as similar in all aspects, other than court processing: 1) youth who are formally processed, 2) youth who are informally processed, and 3) youth who commit the same crimes but are not caught and, therefore, not processed by the system.
Speaker Biographies:
Hon. Maria D. Hernandez – Presiding Juvenile Court Judge of the Superior Court of Orange County
The Honorable Judge Maria Hernandez was appointed Presiding Judge of the Juvenile Court for Orange County on January 1, 2014. Prior to her appointment she was responsible for both dependency and delinquency inventories, presided over Juvenile Drug Court, Dependency Drug Court and the Boys Court program, and chaired the task force relating to Commercially Sexually Exploited Children (CSEC). Currently, Judge Hernandez also serves as a member of Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s “Keeping Kids in School and Out of Court Initiative”, the Judicial Council of California’s “Advisory Committee on Providing Access and Fairness” and serves as faculty for the Judicial Council of California’s Center for Judiciary Education and Research (CJER). Judge Hernandez worked as a senior deputy public defender for the County of Orange as a trial lawyer until she was appointed to the bench as a Commissioner in 2006, and appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger as a judge in 2009. Since 2011, she has served as adjunct Professor of Juvenile and Domestic Law at Western State College of Law. Judge Hernandez is a University of California, Irvine alumni, having graduated with her undergraduate degree from UC Irvine in 1986 and law degree from Western State University-Fullerton in 1991. Before receiving her law degree, Judge Hernandez was a police dispatcher, accident investigator, and public safety officer with the City of Santa Ana Police Department and University of California, Irvine Police Department. Judge Hernandez enjoys maintaining a small inventory of cases while working with juvenile justice partners in the daily administration of juvenile court.
Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman – Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, Education, and Law; Director of the Center for Psychology & Law
Elizabeth Cauffman is a Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior in the School of Social Ecology and holds courtesy appointments in the School of Education and the School of Law. Dr. Cauffman received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Temple University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center on Adolescence at Stanford University. At the broadest level, Dr. Cauffman’s research addresses the intersect between adolescent development and juvenile justice. She has published over 100 articles, chapters, and books on a range of topics in the study of contemporary adolescence, including adolescent brain development, risk-taking and decision-making, parent-adolescent relationships, and juvenile justice. Most recently, findings from Dr. Cauffman’s research were incorporated into the American Psychological Association’s amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons, which abolished the juvenile death penalty, and in both Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, which placed limits on the use of life without parole as a sentence for juveniles. As part of her larger efforts to help research inform practice and policy, she served as a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice and currently directs the Center for Psychology & Law at UCI. To learn more about her research, please visit her Development, Disorder, and Delinquency lab website.
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