17-year-old is found hanging in adult Broward jail; condition unknown
A 17-year-old burglary suspect with mental health problems was found hanging in his cell at the Broward County jail early Sunday morning, several sources have confirmed for the Miami Herald.
The teenager was transported to Broward General Hospital, but his condition was unknown, the sources said.
Nadine Girault, the chief assistant public defender of the juvenile division, said the 17-year-old was in the main jail in Fort Lauderdale, a maximum security facility attached to the county courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, when he was found in his cell, hanging about 3 a.m. He was not in the county’s juvenile detention facility, she said, because the state attorney’s office filed the charges against him as an adult, a controversial and common practice across Florida.
Girault said the teenager had been charged with grand theft of a firearm, but there’s no indication that he used or threatened to use the weapon that he is charged with stealing.
“They file those charges in adult court and that’s a decision that’s made by the state attorney, even with mentally ill children, which is absurd,’’ Girault said.
Broward State Attorney Michael Satz, who is serving his last term as state attorney, has been criticized for his practice of “direct filing” criminal charges against juveniles in adult court. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice reported that Satz’s office, between 2015-2018, direct filed charges against more black children than those of other races. In 2015-2016, the Broward state attorney direct filed 52 children, and of those youths, 32 (62 percent) were black, 13 (25 percent) were white, and 7 (13 percent) were Hispanic, according to the department’s numbers.
Direct filing allows prosecutors to send arrested juveniles to adult court, usually as part of a plea deal in which a teen is pressured to accept incarceration in a juvenile facility to resolve their case. It usually takes place without an airing of the evidence.
The Miami New Times reported last month that Broward County’s chief public defender, Howard Finkelstein, and the county’s chief assistant public defender, Gordon Weekes, wrote a letter to Satz asserting he had failed to adopt common sense criminal justice reforms, including for juvenile offenders.
Among their complaints: that Satz has not formed a panel of experts to review the direct file process for juveniles.
The Broward State Attorney’s Office, in a statement provided Sunday evening, said until this year “state law mandated that certain crimes allegedly committed by juveniles be direct filed in adult court.”
The state attorney said the number of direct file cases “has decreased significantly” in the past several years. Last year, the office said, it filed adult charges against 49 juveniles — “and in at least 42 of those cases, it was due to mandatory requirements of state law.”
This story has been updated with comments from the Broward State Attorney’s Office.
This story was originally published September 1, 2019 at 2:55 PM.