Lanes v. State

• Decision Date: 15 March 1989
• Docket Number: No. 782-86,782-86
• Citation: 767 S.W.2d 789
• Parties: John Kenneth LANES, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Page 789

767 S.W.2d 789

57 USLW 2594

John Kenneth LANES, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.

No. 782-86.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas,

En Banc.

March 15, 1989.

James A. DeLee, Port Arthur, for appellant.

James S. McGrath, Dist. Atty., and R.W. Fisher, Asst. Dist. Atty., Beaumont, Robert Huttash, State's Atty., Austin, for the State.

OPINION ON APPELLANT'S PETITION FOR DISCRETIONARY REVIEW

WHITE, Judge.

Appellant, a juvenile certified for trial as an adult under Section 54.02, V.T.C.A. Family Code, was convicted of burglary of a habitation. ¹ Punishment was assessed at twenty years imprisonment.

The Ninth Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction holding inter alia, that a fingerprint order, issued pursuant to Section 51.15, V.T.C.A., Family Code, provided sufficient probable cause to arrest and fingerprint a juvenile. ² Lanes v. State, 711 S.W.2d 403 (Tex.App.--Beaumont 1986). Appellant petitioned this Court for discretionary review arguing that, independent of the Sec. 51.15, supra, probable cause requirement to fingerprint a child, Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution and the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution require probable cause to arrest a child in order to obtain his fingerprints. Because this raises a question of first impression, i.e., whether the probable cause requirement of Art. I, Sec. 9 and the Fourth Amendment applies in full force to a juvenile arrest, ³ we granted appellant's petition. Tex.R.App.Proc., Rule 200(c)(2). After having carefully considered the issues, we now hold that it does.

The facts of the case can be simply stated. Pursuant to a consent order from the juvenile court authorizing the taking of appellant's fingerprints, a police officer arrested appellant at his high school, transported him to the police station and took his fingerprints. ⁴ The trial court as well as the Court of Appeals found that this order provided sufficient authority for an arrest. We disagree.

The issue presented is whether the probable cause requisite of Art. I, Sec. 9 of the Texas Constitution and the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth, applies to the arrest of a child. ⁵ This precise issue has not been decided by our Court or the U.S. Supreme Court. ⁶ It has, however, long been settled that the Fourth Amendment is, to some undetermined extent, applicable to juvenile proceedings. This rule was best expressed in the seminal opinion on juvenile rights--In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1428, 18 L.Ed.2d 527 (1967). The Gault Court stated, "[n]either the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone." Gault, supra at 13, 87 S.Ct. at 1436. To the same effect is Haley v. Ohio, 332 U.S. 596, 601, 68 S.Ct. 302, 304, 92 L.Ed. 224 (1948) and Gallegos v. Colorado, 370 U.S. 49, 82 S.Ct. 1209, 8 L.Ed.2d 325 (1962).

In order to best understand the unique framework from which this question is to be decided, a terse historical explanation of the juvenile system is necessary. ⁷ From its inception in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899, the juvenile justice system has been protectively maintained as a civil, socio-legal entity distinct and separate from the criminal justice system. The philosophical basis of this separation was to create a system wherein juveniles were rehabilitated rather than incarcerated, protected rather than punished--the very antithesis of the adult criminal system.

The creators of the juvenile system rejected the adult example as punitive, cruel and nonrehabilitative. This rejection was so extreme that even the vocabulary of the criminal system was discarded and replaced by more palatable terminology. Instead of being "arrested," "jailed" and "indicted," juveniles were to be "taken into custody," "detained" and a "petition" was to be filed for further "protection." Terms such as "trial," "criminal," and "imprisonment" were replaced with the softer terms of "hearing," "juvenile delinquent" or "a child in need of supervision," and "commitment." Medical metaphors such as diagnosis, rehabilitation, and counseling accented the new juvenile vocabulary in order to better characterize the type of treatment intended.

Further, the roles of the juvenile court's participants were to be very different than those of the adult. The State, instead of prosecuting, was to proceed as parens patriae, ⁸ with the welfare of the child being the penultimate and uniform goal. Social service personnel, probation officers, and clinicians, rather than lawyers, prosecutors, and prison guards, were to become the major forces in the system. Justice William O. Douglas best characterized the system's participants:

I, the judge, and the bailiff and the other court attendants are like those on a hospital staff, dressed in white. We are doctors, nurses, orderlies. We are there not to administer law in the normal meaning of criminal law. We are there to diagnose, investigate, counsel and advise. We are specialists in search of ways and means to correct conduct and help reorient wayward youngsters to a life cognizant of responsibilities to the community.

William O. Douglas, Foreword to Wakin, Children Without Justice: A Report by the National Council of Jewish Women (1975) at v.

The entire juvenile system was engineered to create a setting of informality and openness in order to facilitate prompt, personalized and professional responses to the child's individual needs. A relaxed atmosphere was considered integral to engendering a rehabilitative sense of trust and dispelling fear and anxiety. The rigid, punitive and nonforgiving adult model was completely discarded and envisioned in its place was a system of sociological jurisprudence which dispensed a higher form of justice. Thus, our juvenile system was wrought from the most enlightened and humanitarian motives. ⁹

These noble ideals, however, had the practical, paradoxical effect of denying juveniles many fundamental constitutional and procedural rights. See generally, Fox, The Reform of Juvenile Justice: An Historical Perspective, 22 Stan.L.Rev. 187 (1970). Because the system was designed to help rather than punish and all were charged with acting in the child's best interests, the procedural and constitutional rights inherent in the adult system were deemed unnecessary, and, in fact, counter to the juvenile system's goals. McKeiver, supra 403 U.S. at 544 fn. 5, 547, 91 S.Ct. at 1986 fn. 5, 1987; In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358, 375, 90 S.Ct. 1068, 1078, 25 L.Ed.2d 368 (1970) (Harlan, J., concurring). Procedural requisites were considered detrimental to flexibility, swiftness, openness, honesty and simplicity. Gault, supra 387 U.S. at 38-39, fn. 65, 87 S.Ct. at 1449-50, fn. 65. Throughout all proceedings discretion was maximized in order to provide optimal flexibility in diagnosis and treatment with the constant focus being the child's lifestyle and character rather than whether he committed the crime.

Ideally, information collected from and about the child would be used for the child rather than against him; thus, any limitations on the collection of information would only serve to subvert such aid. Because the system's aims were to be benevolent, solicitude individualized and intervention scientifically founded, there was no perceived need for the State's power to be narrowly circumscribed. Thus, as ironical as it may seem, one can logically deduce how the initial protective purposes of the system validly subrogated procedural and constitutional requisites. See generally, Rothman, supra; Worrell, supra at 176; Murphy, Our Kindly Parent ... The State-The Juvenile Justice System and How It Works (1977) (esp. chapters 1 & 3).

Especially at the genesis of the system, juveniles were denied virtually all rights. The adult adversarial construct was discarded along with the rights of confrontation, a record, a jury, a right to appeal, notice, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and even counsel. See, e.g., In re Gault, supra. Juvenile proceedings were defined as civil rather than criminal, rendering inapplicable the rules of criminal evidence and their appropriate safeguards against admittance of prejudicial and inflammatory evidence. See, V.T.C.A., Family Code Sec. 51.17 (juvenile proceedings still maintained as civil action).

Thus, the juvenile system's protective rejection of the adult system came at the cost of the procedural and constitutional protections attendant thereto; a dubious tradeoff--to say the least--and, as was recognized early on, the results have been less than satisfactory. Gault, supra 387 U.S. at 21-31, 87 S.Ct. at 1440-46; Note, Juvenile Delinquents: The Police, State Courts and Individualized Justice, 79 Harv.L.Rev. 175 (1966); Allen, The Borderland of Criminal Justice (1964) at 18; Tappan, Juvenile Delinquency (1949) (esp. pp. 204-205).

As the system grew, it soon became overwhelmed. Crowded dockets and overburdened placement facilities doused and embittered rehabilitative spirits. The lack of procedural safeguards allowed the overwrought juvenile courts to operate in an atmosphere conducive to discretionary abuse, arbitrariness, and discrimination. Gault, supra; Rothman, supra; Ryerson, The Best-Laid Plans: America's Juvenile Court Experiment (1978). As early as 1937, Dean Pound likened the juvenile system to the Star Chamber stating, "[t]he powers of the Star Chamber were a trifle in comparison with those of our juvenile courts." Foreward to Young, Social Treatment in Probation and Delinquency (1937). Likewise in 1967 the Supreme Court recognized, "Juvenile Court history has again demonstrated that unbridled discretion, however benevolently motivated, is frequently a poor substitute for principle and procedure." Gault, supra at 19, 87 S.Ct. at 1439. Thus, as practical reality brought into focus the injustices being wrought by the lack of procedural safeguards, Justice Frankfurter's famous words, "[t]he history of...