Law & Fiction — Questioning juveniles

In a recent discussion in a writers’ forum on how and when police could question a person, a writer made the excellent point that what we’d been saying is how the law SHOULD work, but that it often DOESN’T work that way, especially in communities of color or of lower socioeconomic status. Further, she stressed, we as writers should not “imply an equity that does not exist.”

So when I saw this blog post from the Washington State Bar Assn on a new ordinance in King County (which includes Seattle), I thought the writers among you would be interested — readers, too, but for different reasons. The ordinance requires police to connect any youth under 18 with a public defender before questioning or searching them, except in emergencies where police “reasonably believe the information sought is necessary to protect someone’s life from an imminent threat and the questioning is limited to that purpose.” The post, by a public defender, summarizes the problem, including statistics, and the tragic shooting that led to the ordinance. Kids’ brains aren’t fully developed yet. They often lack the judgment or experience needed to handle difficult situations. They don’t always react the way adults think they should – and it’s up to us as adults and as a society to remember that.

This may already be the law in your story state – although I am a member of both the WA and MT bars, I live and practice in MT, where law enforcement has long been prohibited from interrogating anyone 16 or younger without an attorney, parent, or guardian present. Even so, we need to remember as both citizens and writers that it doesn’t always work that way.

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