One young man admitted to stealing a $2.97 set of Halloween plastic fangs. His dream of an army career may therefore be over

WM has a dream. When he finishes high school next year, he’s going to join the army. He’ll enlist in a combat unit where they’ll teach him discipline and the skills he needs to lead. He’ll work hard, as he does now in the junior reserve officer training course at school. Eventually, he’ll learn how to jump out of planes.

If they send him to war, well, that’ll be OK. He’ll go through the ranks, serve 30 years, then retire and use his military pension to start a soul-food joint. He doesn’t mind where – down by the water, Florida perhaps – so long as it’s far away from Cordele, the small town in southern Georgia he is desperate to escape.



But there’s a problem with WM’s dream. Last October, he was charged with shoplifting a $2.97 set of Halloween fangs from Walmart.

The following month, WM, then 16 years old, was summoned to Cordele’s juvenile court. He had never been to a courthouse before, and was struck by how all the official people there were white and all the kids waiting to be prosecuted black, like him.

When the judge turned up – an “old white lady”, he calls her – she told him he had a right to a defence lawyer paid for by the public, but that there were none available in court that day. She asked him if he wanted to go ahead without an attorney, or come back later when there might – or might not – be a lawyer around to advise him.

“She said nothing about the dangers of not having a lawyer, or explain how one could help me,” WM says. “I wanted to get it over with, didn’t want it hanging over my head.”

And so, he explained, speaking to the Guardian in Cordele’s library but requesting anonymity because of his sensitive legal situation, he did what seemed sensible to him at the time. He told the judge he’d go ahead with the hearing. He admitted to the offence, and the judge sentenced him to nine months probation, 40 hours' community service and an 8pm curfew.

WM hadn’t realized, and no one had warned him, that his decision to proceed without a lawyer had serious consequences. It meant that, for a $2.97 set of Halloween fangs, he now had a juvenile record, and with that he had jeopardised his chances of joining the army. The army routinely carries out background checks on all its potential recruits, and a juvenile record could be grounds for rejection.

WM is not alone. The Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) has investigated Cordele’s judicial circuit, which covers four counties and 65,000 people, and found that hundreds of children from poor families are routinely pushed through court without legal counsel, with similar results.

In 2012, 681 children, most of them black, went through Cordele circuit courts for juvenile offences, according to an SCHR analysis of state records. Of those, only 52 were represented by public defenders, and though some others had their own private lawyers the number was likely to be very small as the overall group was overwhelmingly poor.

That means that each year more than 600 kids under the age of 17 are effectively being thrown into the bearpit of the US criminal justice system and left to fend for themselves.

“Adults don’t do well in court without the benefits of counsel, but children – they don’t have a prayer,” said Sara Totonchi, SCHR’s executive director.

“These kids’ lives are going to be ruined because of their lack of legal representation and their interaction with this court. It’s a particularly egregious dismissal of the importance of human lives and of constitutional rights.”

Though the lawsuit is targeted specifically at the Cordele judicial circuit, the problem it highlights is rampant nationwide. Public defenders complain of chronic lack of resources in many other states, from California to Louisiana and Missouri.



The problem is so widespread that last year the American Bar Association passed a resolution denouncing the lack of a properly funded indigent defense service as a “national scandal”. The federal system of indigent defense is also creaking. Last August the US attorney general, Eric Holder, warned of a “state of crisis” in legal representation for poor people and said that budget cuts forced by Congress had “decimated public defenders nationwide”.

Robert Schwartz, head of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, said the abandonment of children sent ripples through the whole of society:

Research has shown that when kids have a sense that the system is fair, they grow up to believe in the rule of law. Conversely, when they think they are treated unfairly they can turn against it, and that has consequences for all of us.

There is also a strong racial element to the problem. African Americans make up less than half of the population of the Cordele circuit, but account for 74% of referrals to the juvenile courts.



Among those referrals are children like AJ, a 13-year-old girl who last year got into trouble at school, ranging from disruptive behaviour in the classroom to a school fight. The police were called; she was arrested in school and charged with affray, simple battery, disorderly conduct and four counts of classroom disruption.

In court, she applied for a public defender and intended to deny all the charges. But in December, having walked a mile with her mother to the courthouse, she was told no public defender was available to see her.

AJ decided to wait, and returned to court on 13 December, only to meet her public attorney just minutes before she was due to appear before the judge.

“Although I wanted to deny my charges, I decided to admit to them because I did not think my lawyer would be able to fight for me since we hadn’t talked about my case since my first court date,” she said in an affidavit.

AJ was sentenced to two weeks in detention and a year’s probation. She was taken away immediately, and spent Christmas in a youth detention camp 70 miles from home.

AJ and WM are now attempting to force change in Cordele by using the legal system against itself. The two teenagers are among the plaintiffs of a lawsuit brought with the help of SCHR against the governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal; the state’s public defender standards council; and politicians, judges and prosecutors in the Cordele circuit.

The lawsuit, NP v Georgia, seeks redress for the dearth of public defenders in juvenile court, which it says is a violation of the US constitution. In 1963, the US supreme court ruled in the landmark case of Gideon vs Wainwright that states must provide legal representation for defendants who cannot afford it on their own.

Despite the supreme court’s ruling, the right to counsel remains an illusion for so many children in southern Georgia. The lawsuit records that in 2009 the four counties that make up the Cordele judicial circuit decided to stop funding two public defender positions, thus paring the service down to the bone. Today, just three public defense lawyers handle the workload of eight juvenile and adult courts.

Data from the Georgia legal authorities underlines how over-stretched the lawyers are. In 2012 the three attorneys dealt with 1,384 cases. Two of them handled more than 600 cases each, including more than 300 felonies – about three times the caseload recommended by the American Bar Association and other professional bodies.

As a result, children who cannot afford their own lawyer are left floundering. Judges have been known to tell defendants to speak directly to prosecutors about their cases without warning them of the dangers of doing so, and have even told children puzzled about a legal point to ask their parents for advice.

The time-strapped public defenders, the lawsuit notes, often meet their teenaged clients for the first time in the recess before a case is heard, with just minutes to get to know them and the charges they face. Sometimes the attorneys ask their clients, the lawsuit claims, to investigate their own cases, and to identify and find witnesses for themselves.

A similar paucity of service is repeated across the country, including for adult defendants facing criminal charges. As the Department of Justice itself notes, public attorneys can be stretched so thin they spend on average just seven minutes per case.



The Georgia public defender standards council, the state agency responsible for ensuring the service is consistent with the guarantees set out under the US constitution, said it was unable to respond to the criticism contained in the lawsuit as litigation is pending. Timothy Eidson, the chief public defender in the Cordele circuit, did not respond to questions from the Guardian.



The lack of legal counsel is not just a bureaucratic issue – it changes lives. Left to their own devices, children often admit to charges that a good lawyer might have had thrown out of court.

“There are other options besides a kid admitting to offences and getting probation or being sent to detention, but none of the alternatives are happening in this circuit because nobody is advocating for them,” said Atteeyah Hollie, the lead SCHR attorney on the lawsuit.

The children absolutely do not know how to do that on their own.

Though juvenile records are supposed to be sealed, in a small town like Cordele it is often impossible to keep news of a sentence private. That in turn can affect relations at school, future job prospects, funding for college – in fact, the entire trajectory of a child’s life.

“Once you’ve been in that courtroom, you’ve got this permanent mark on you,” Totonchi says. “These kids are making dumb mistakes, the stupid stuff that teenagers do. And we are defining them by those mistakes, which is an incredibly shallow way of looking at them. Our clients are so much more than the dumb things they’ve done.”

WM has a few more months of his probation still to run. He’s worried about how he’s going to find the $50 court fee he has been billed for the privilege of having been prosecuted. If he doesn’t come up with the money, he could find himself hauled back in front of the judge and his probation extended.

He’s been delaying his application to the army until his probation lapses, but he knows that even then he is certain to be asked by army recruitment officers to disclose his juvenile record, and that those Halloween fangs could scupper his hopes of enlistment.

“I bet they won’t let me in,” he says, looking glum. “They see me as a thief, and they don’t want thieves in the army. But that’s not who I am.”