Juvenile Forensic Psychology

Juvenile Forensic Psychology The article I selected is call “The Impact of Juveniles’ Ages and Levels of Psychosocial Maturity on Judges’ Opinions about Adjudicative Competence” (Cox, 2012). The author focus on this research is to investigate whether the defendant’s ages and levels of psychosocial maturity would affect judge’s ratings of juveniles in a juvenile and criminal court (Cox, 2012). The method they use on this research they mail 48 judges from 25 states. The cases in which a state did not have more than 48 judges, all judges were recruited for participation (Cox, 2012). There was 342 participants 73.4% were men and 26.6% were women. 86% were white, 3.2% Hispanic, 1.2% African- American/Black, 0.9% Asian or Pacific Islander, 0.6% American Indian, 0.3% identified as other, and 5.6 % indicated that they preferred not to answer (Cox, 2012). 23% of responding judges were from urban areas, 15% were from suburban areas, and 56% were from rural areas (Cox, 2012). 45% had been civil trial lawyers, 34% prosecutors, 29% private criminal defense attorneys, 13% public defenders, 9% transactional lawyers, and 25% had engaged in other types of legal work (Cox, 2012). Eighteen percent of the judges preside courts to deal with adult criminal matters, and 16% judges presided to deal with juvenile criminal matters (Cox, 2012). The results of this article were the judges indicated juvenile cases should be in juvenile court rooms rather in a criminal court. The judges also extent the juvenile in the hypothetical report was to stand trial in both criminal court and juvenile court (Cox, 2012). I do agree with the judges first of all we have heard and seen more cases on juveniles murdering, sexual …show more content…
M., Goldstein, N. E., Dolores, J., Zelechoski, A. D., & Messenheimer, S. (2012). The impact of juveniles' ages and levels of psychosocial maturity on judges' opinions about adjudicative competence. Law and Human Behavior, 36(1), 21-27.