Utah's Juvenile Court Turns 120

• Year: 2025
• Citation: Vol. 38 No. 1 Pg. 14
• Pages: 14
• Date: 01 January 2025

Utah's Juvenile Court Turns 120No. Vol. 38 No. 1 Pg. 14Utah Bar JournalJanuary, 2025

Views from the Bench / Southern Utah

by The Hon. Michael F. Leavitt

hen people talk about sacred places, they often talk about a church, synagogue, temple, or maybe the mountains or the desert, all places where people can commune with their higher power, connect with nature, or meditate and find clarity or purpose in their lives.

For me, what makes a place sacred has expanded over the years. Take a hospital, for example. In those antiseptic and busy buildings, most of us take our first breath and many our last. In each room, folks experience the full range of human emotions, indescribable joy at the birth of their child, fear of the unknown, pain, and deep grief when they have to say good-bye to someone they love.

Or a homeless shelter, where one finds people truly at the end of their rope, desperate for someone to help them just find a warm place to stay for the night and maybe have a hot meal. And someone usually does.

Each is a place where it seems humanity is, well, at its most human.

A juvenile courtroom is just such a place. Here, we find parents pleading for help with their wayward child and praying they'll catch a broader vision of their own future. We find kids, experiencing the full impact of their choices with a still-developing brain. We find parents, trying to find a way to be safe for their children, accounting for their own choices and perhaps those of the generations before them. We find children experiencing the painful cognitive dissonance of both loving and fearing an abusive or neglectful parent.

All of us in juvenile court - the attorneys, caseworkers, probation officers, and judicial assistants - stand as witnesses to the miracles and tragedies that happen here, and each plays an important part in helping create a safe and healthy place for kids and parents to find a way out of whatever mess in which they might find themselves.

And the juvenile court judge is tasked with maintaining some kind of order in this human messiness, balancing the constitutional rights of parents, the public's right to safety, and the need to both correct a child's behavior and protect them.

Joseph E. Frick, a Utah Supreme Court justice at the turn of the twentieth century, understood the juvenile court judge's assignment. In 1907, he penned the first supreme court opinion on an appeal from juvenile court in Mill v. Brown. 88 P. 609 (Utah 1907). Albert Mill was a thirteen-year-old kid who got caught stealing a box of cigars. Id. at 610. Judge Willis Brown, a newly appointed juvenile court judge, found him guilty and sentenced him to the State Industrial School in Ogden "until he shall have attained the age of twenty-one years, unless sooner released by the board of control of said institution." Id.

At the time, only parents who had lost custody of their child had the right to appeal a juvenile court order. So, Albert's father, Emil Mill, appealed Judge Brown's decision. The supreme court reversed Judge Brown with a sharp rebuke. In doing so, Justice Frick said:

To administer juvenile laws in accordance with their true spirit and intent requires a [person] of broad mind, of almost infinite patience, and one who is the possessor of great faith in humanity and thoroughly imbued with that spirit. Those who come, and are intended to be brought, before...