A jury will not consider the case. Instead, it will be heard in the confidential setting of the Jefferson County Family Court. Lawyers who are not involved said the proceedings could lead to oversight of the boy and, potentially, to confinement until he is 21. (In Alabama, a case cannot be transferred to an adult court unless the defendant was at least 14 when the suspected misconduct occurred.)

The district attorney’s office has declined to comment on the case against the boy, who is in the custody of the Alabama Department of Human Resources. But amid mounting criticism of the government’s tactics, a former Juvenile Court prosecutor in neighboring Shelby County said Wednesday that she, too, would have pursued a serious charge against the boy.

“They either had to say ‘we’re not going to charge’ or ‘we are going to charge,’ and once they say they’re not, that’s going to be a huge problem, because then the child won’t get any services by the state,” said the former prosecutor, Lara M. Alvis, who is now a defense lawyer and a candidate for a Circuit Court judgeship. “With a child like this, if you don’t get that child into the courtroom or into the system somehow, you’re leaving a child out there. It’d be like a police officer letting a drunk driver drive off without taking him to jail.”

Sharp questions about juvenile justice are familiar terrain for Alabama. In a 2012 case to which the state was a party, the United States Supreme Court ruled that juveniles convicted of homicide could not receive mandatory sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But Mr. Neiman, who argued that case, Miller v. Alabama, as the state’s solicitor general, said the hard-line approach in Jefferson County did not necessarily reflect attitudes in the state.

“This would have been a decision made by a local official, as opposed to the attorney general of Alabama or the governor of Alabama,” he said. “It’s kind of difficult to say that this makes the state of Alabama an outlier.”