In re Gault

In re Gault was an important part of the "due process revolution" that took place during the 1960s, during which many of the rights guaranteed by the first ten amendments to the Constitution--the Bill of Rights--were seen to apply at the state as well as the federal level.

Gerald Gault had his first serious brush with the law early in 1964 when he was picked up by police for having been in the company of another boy who had stolen a wallet from a woman's purse. As a result of this incident, a six-month order of probation was entered against him on 25 February 1964. It was still in effect on 8 June 1964, when Gault was taken into custody by Gila County, Arizona, police for having, together with a friend, made an allegedly obscene phone call to a neighbor.

Both of Gerald Gault's parents were at work when he was taken into custody. They were not notified of his detention. Nor were they served with the petition for a preliminary hearing filed by a probation officer. At the hearing, which was held the next day, Gerald Gault was accompanied by his mother and older brother, but was not represented by counsel. He was still without a lawyer when, a week later, he appeared at a hastily scheduled sentencing hearing. Without an attorney and deprived of an opportunity to confront or cross-examine his accuser, who was not present at either hearing, Gault was convicted almost entirely on the basis of his admission that he had taken part in the phone call. At 15, he was declared a juvenile delinquent and committed to the State Industrial School for a period of up to six years. Arizona permitted no appeals in juvenile cases.

A petition for habeas corpus, requesting that Gault be released on grounds that he had been illegally detained, was filed in the state supreme court, which referred it to the trial court. When Gault's petition was rejected, this decision was appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, which likewise declined to release Gault. His parents then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which considered the matter "in re," that is, in a nonadversarial proceeding requiring only a legal decision, not full litigation.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, juvenile defenders had been subjected to parens patriae, that is, a paternalistic, ostensibly protective attitude towards unruly children. As a result, an entirely separate juvenile justice system had developed. Aiming for flexibility and informality, too often this system resulted in a failure of due process for the defendants who were subjected to it. The Supreme Court first addressed this problem in Kent v. United States (1966), in which the legal process for juvenile offenders--who were often handed lengthy sentences in informal proceedings where they were deprived of due process guarantees--faced what the Court called "the worst of both worlds."