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Trial as an adult is a term used to describe a situation when a juvenile offender is tried as if they were an adult.
Where specific protections exist for juvenile offenders (such as suppression of an offenders name or picture or a closed courtroom where the proceedings are not made public), these protections may be waived.
Sanctions handed down are often harsher than those imposed on people tried as minors.
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In some criminal jurisdictions, certain juvenile offences (such as homicide) automatically attract an adult trial. In others, this decision may be left to the judge, magistrate or prosecutor.
Juveniles are generally tried in a youth court. If a juvenile is charged with an offence that was committed alongside an adult, then both offenders will be tried in an adult magistrates' court, except if it is necessary in the interests of justice that they both be tried in Crown Court.[1]
Juveniles may also be tried as adults in Crown Court for serious offences such as homicide, certain firearms offences, and grave crimes[2] (including sexual assault and child sex offences). Unlike in the Youth Court, trials are open to the public. Media name suppression can be waived at the discretion of the judge, but the young person has no authority in law to insist their own name be released.
Most juveniles are tried in juvenile court. For especially violent offences, juveniles under 18 are tried as adults. Some states, for example Kentucky, restrict the minimum age to be tried as an adult to 14.
Other states such as Florida have passed laws allowing a person charged with an extremely heinous crime such as murder to be tried as an adult, regardless of age.[3]. Once a juvenile has stood trial as an adult and been convicted and sentenced, they are thereafter "handled in every respect as an adult for any subsequent violation of state law."[4]
Many states also require juveniles to be tried as an adult if the defendant has previously been found guilty of an offense that would have been a felony if it were committed by an adult.
Although the Sanctions are more serious in this kind of case than if the juvenile was tried as a child, certain allowances are still made due to the fact the offender is a minor.
This includes a juvenile offender not being forced to serve time in an adult prison, or with adult prisoners. Extreme sanctions such as the death penalty are generally not handed down to minors. Since 1990, only nine countries have executed offenders aged under 18 years at the time of their crime. These are the People's Republic of China (PRC), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United States and Yemen.[5] Juvenile execution is currently prohibited in the United States following the ruling of the Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons.