AC v. State
| Decision Date | 13 February 2004 |
| Citation | 888 So.2d 518 |
| Parties | A.C. v. STATE of Alabama. |
| Court | Alabama Court of Civil Appeals |
Tobie J. Smith of Legal Aid Society of Birmingham, Birmingham, for appellant.
William H. Pryor, Jr., atty. gen., and Stephanie N. Morman and Jean-Paul M. Chappell, asst. attys. gen., for appellee.
On April 3, 2003, the attendance supervisor of the Jefferson County Board of Education filed a verified complaint charging that A.C., a 12-year-old sixth-grade girl, was a child in need of supervision ("CHINS") because she had been habitually truant, having accumulated 26 unexcused absences and 9 unexcused tardies from school. A.C. entered a plea of "true" to the complaint, and the juvenile court adjudicated her as a CHINS.1 This appeal is properly before this court pursuant to Rule 28(A)(2), Ala. R. Juv. P. See S.H. v. State, 868 So.2d 1110 (Ala.Civ.App.2003) (Crawley, J., with one Judge concurring and one Judge concurring in the result)
.
The juvenile court placed A.C. on probation and ordered her to complete the "High Intensity Training" or "H.I.T." program, a residential boot camp for juveniles administered under the supervision of the Department of Youth Services ("DYS"). The court further directed the "paperwork [for the H.I.T. program] to be held and submitted at the probation officer's discretion."
A.C. appeals, arguing that, based on § 12-15-71(e), Ala.Code 1975, the juvenile court had no authority to order her to attend a juvenile-boot-camp program. Subsection (e) of § 12-15-71 is one of three subsections that govern the disposition of a CHINS. It provides:
"(e) No child found to be in need of supervision, unless also found to be delinquent, shall be committed to or placed in an institution or facility established for the care and rehabilitation of delinquent children unless the court finds upon a further hearing that the child is not amenable to treatment or rehabilitation under any prior disposition or unless the child is again alleged to be a child in need of supervision and the court, after hearing, so finds."
A.C. argues that a juvenile-boot-camp program is a "facility established for the care and rehabilitation of delinquent children." Therefore, she insists, boot camp is not available as a dispositional option for a child who has been adjudicated for the first time as a CHINS and who has not been found, after a hearing, to be "not amenable to treatment or rehabilitation."
Pursuant to Rule 28(A)(1)(b), Ala. R. Juv. P., and § 12-12-72(2), Ala.Code 1975, the parties stipulated that only questions of law were involved in the appeal, and the juvenile court certified the following:
(Emphasis in original.)
For a more complete understanding of the dispositional options open to the juvenile court in a CHINS case, we quote a rather lengthy portion of the juvenile-procedure statutes, specifically various subsections of § 12-15-71, Ala.Code 1975, highlighting at the end, the provision at issue in this case:
(Emphasis added.)
Initially, the State contends that A.C. does not have standing to raise the issue of the juvenile court's authority to order her to complete the H.I.T. program boot camp because, it argues, A.C. has not yet been — and may never be — required to enter the boot camp. The State points out that A.C.'s entry into the H.I.T. program is at the discretion of her probation officer, and it argues that, because A.C. has not entered the program, she has not suffered an injury in fact.
In State v. Property at 2018 Rainbow Drive, 740 So.2d 1025 (Ala.1999), our supreme court explained the concept of standing:
It is undisputed that A.C. has been adjudicated as a CHINS only once. It is also undisputed that the juvenile court did not find, after a hearing, that A.C. was "not amenable to treatment or rehabilitation under any prior disposition." § 12-15-71(e). Therefore, A.C. has a legally protected right not to be "committed to or placed in an institution or facility established for the care and rehabilitation of delinquent children." Id., If the H.I.T. program boot camp is such a facility, then A.C.'s being ordered by the juvenile court to complete that program is a violation of "a legally protected right," notwithstanding the fact that the juvenile court's order was, in effect, suspended and A.C. was put on probation. See Ex parte Shelton, 851 So.2d 96 (Ala.2000),
affirmed, Alabama v. Shelton, 535 U.S. 654, 122 S.Ct. 1764, 152 L.Ed.2d 888 (2002).
In Ex parte Shelton, the Alabama Supreme Court was called on to decide whether a criminal defendant who had been convicted of a misdemeanor and sentenced to 30 days' imprisonment, but whose sentence was suspended and who was placed on probation, had the constitutional right to appointed counsel under the Sixth Amendment. The court observed that neither Argersinger v. Hamlin, 407 U.S. 25, 92 S.Ct. 2006, 32 L.Ed.2d 530 (1972), nor Scott v. Illinois, 440 U.S. 367, 99 S.Ct. 1158, 59 L.Ed.2d 383 (1979) — both of which held that no person may be sentenced to a term of imprisonment, even for a misdemeanor offense, unless he was represented by counsel at trial — answered the question whether a suspended or probated sentence constitutes a "term of imprisonment." Noting a split of authority among jurisdictions that had considered the issue, our supreme court principally relied on the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in United States v. Reilley, 948 F.2d 648 (10th Cir.1991). In Reilley, the court stated:
948 F.2d at 654. In Ex parte Shelton, our supreme court held that the defendant "was entitled to representation by counsel ...
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HJ v. State
...N. Morman and Jean-Paul M. Chappell, asst. attys. gen., for appellee. PER CURIAM. This appeal1 is a companion case to A.C. v. State, 888 So.2d 518 (Ala.Civ.App.2004). In this case, as in A.C., a juvenile who had never previously been adjudicated to be a child in need of supervision ("CHINS"......