State law stopped prosecution of youths under 16 as adults, but San Diego DA may have found a way around that

When then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 1391 into law on the last day of September in 2018, he did something that governors do for only a handful of the hundreds of bills that cross their desks — he attached a brief statement describing his reasons.

The legislation prohibits prosecutors from transferring a case against anyone under 16 years old from the juvenile justice courts to adult criminal courts. California lowered the age when juveniles could be tried as adults in 1995, ushering in an era where an estimated 1,500 14-and 15-year olds faced transfer to the adult system.

The law marked another step in the dismantling of the state’s two-decade long approach of increasingly harsher punishments for youths in favor of a less punitive model more focused on rehabilitation.

Brown said he was aware of not only the strong opposition to the bill, but also the “stark racial and geographic disparity in how young men and women are treated who have committed similar crimes.” And then he sounded a philosophical note.

“There is a fundamental principle at stake here: whether we want a society which at least attempts to reform the youngest offenders before consigning them to adult prisons where their likelihood of becoming a lifelong criminal is so much higher.”

Now six years later, Brown’s musings are being tested in an unprecedented way.

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan in July announced she was dismissing murder and attempted murder charges against two 15-year-olds charged in connection with two shootings in Chula Vista in March.

Instead, she said, the case was being transferred across the street — to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for prosecution in federal district court.

Federal law does not have a similar ban on treating defendants younger than 16 as adults. The federal system also handles far fewer juvenile cases than California courts, and has no juvenile court system per se. 

While few details about the shootings are known, news reports have said that the shootings were related to a feud between rival Mexican drug cartels. A relative of one of the youths confirmed in an interview with inewsource that the theory of the case is the pair, along with an adult who was killed, were acting on behalf of a cartel.

Juveniles convicted in state courts can’t be held beyond their 25th birthday. If tried as adults in federal court the two youths face potentially life in prison.

Juvenile justice advocates were stunned by Stephan’s decision, and accused the DA of blatantly making an end-run around California law. 

“It’s obvious to me this is a decision to circumvent our state laws, in some ways subvert the will of the people and the legislature, in favor of a federal system that is wholly inappropriate for youth justice or serving juveniles and really focused on punishment,” said Frankie Guzman, the senior director for youth justice at the National Center for Youth Law. 

Other advocates were concerned that DAs in other counties could copy Stephan and begin sending some cases over to the federal courts in their areas. 

Stephan announced her decision in a news release on July 29, in which she cited internal office statistics showing juvenile crime was on the rise over the past two years. Yet state Department of Justice data show juvenile arrests in San Diego have declined substantially over the past decade. 

She also echoed the popular rhetoric used to justify harsh policies against juveniles in the past — that sophisticated adults recruit youth to commit crimes, exploiting the more lenient punishments in the juvenile system. 

“There’s a growing public safety concern that adult criminals are enticing minors to commit violent crimes with assurances they will escape accountability due to California’s state juvenile laws,” Stephan said in the release.

Stephan declined several requests for an interview or comment from inewsource. Though the DA’s office is no longer involved in the case, a spokesperson for Stephan said she was “not able to discuss this case” and it was “inappropriate” to do so.

However, it appears that her office is willing to share information about the state-to-federal move with fellow prosecutors. Next week at a training session sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association — which opposed SB 1391 — there is a session titled “Filing Federal Charges in Juvenile Homicide Cases.”

Listed as one of two technical advisors for the training is Deputy District Attorney Lisa Weinreb — the chief of the juvenile division for the San Diego DA.

Two shootings

The case is shrouded in secrecy because of the confidentiality laws that govern juvenile cases and shield nearly all details from public view. 

News organizations were barred from a July 29 hearing in San Diego Juvenile Court where Stephan’s office formally dismissed the charges. Records of that hearing and the case are not public.

Despite the secrecy, some details of the case have become public. The San Diego Union-Tribune, citing sources on both sides of the border, said the youths are charged in connection with two shootings that occurred within hours of each other on March 26 and March 27 in East Chula Vista that were part of an ongoing battle between Mexican drug cartels that spilled over the border. 

The first shooting occurred outside a Chili’s restaurant in a strip mall on East H Street and Paseo del Rey. James Bryant Corona, reputedly a leader of a drug cell linked to a remnant of the once-fearsome Arellano-Félix cartel, was wounded in the shooting. 

A Mexican law enforcement official told the U-T that Bryant was “one of the main generators of violence” in the Tijuana region.

Hours later, a second shooting at the Salerno Luxury Rentals apartment complex in Otay Ranch left one man dead and a 24-year-old man wounded. The man who died has not been publicly identified. 

The two youths were arrested a short time later. Though facing murder charges, neither of them are charged with actually firing the fatal shots. 

Instead, sources with knowledge of the case who declined to be identified because of the confidentiality of juvenile proceedings said the pair are charged under the legal theory known as the “provocative act” murder.

That doctrine says that someone can be guilty of murder if they intentionally commit an act against someone, which then provokes that person to kill another. It is often invoked in gun battles: a defendant fires at someone else, who returns fire, killing a third person. 

That appears to be what has occurred in the Chula Vista case. The victim, who has not been identified, was an adult who sources said recruited the two youths to help carry out the attacks, and was killed during the gunfight by the target of the attack.

In addition to murder and attempted murder charges, the two youth are facing federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) charges, too, according to the relative of one of the youths. 

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has refused to comment at all on the case. Hearings for juveniles in the federal courts are almost always closed to all but parties to the case, and any records are kept off the public court index. Lawyers for the youths also said they could not comment.

Federal courts, like their state counterparts, also have a process in which a judge determines — in closed hearings — if a youth should be tried as an adult. A relative of one of the youths told inewsource that the judge in the case said in court earlier this month that the transfer hearing would begin soon.

Few federal juvenile inmates

The announcement that the case was being transferred to federal court and the reasons outlined in the news release alarmed juvenile justice advocates around the state. 

“She articulates very clearly in her press release that this is about punishment,” said Brooke Harris, the executive director of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center in Oakland. “Punishment is a part of the juvenile court system, but it's not the only part of it. And by focusing on punishment, she's taking away the rehabilitative commitment that California has made to young people.”

Moreover, juvenile justice advocates in California said that the federal system is not as prepared as state systems to handle juveniles. Laura Ridolfi, policy director at the Burns Institute in Oakland, said “there are not the right kinds of services for young people in the federal system.”

Ridolfi, whose organization co-sponsored SB 1391, said the legislation recognized teens under 16 benefit from the kinds of services available in the state juvenile system. 

“We have made these decisions in the state of California to shift the way we do justice for young people based on research that tells us that treating young people with dignity and humanity and rehabilitation and services and treatment is going to do them good,” she said. “And putting them in a cell with few services to no services is going to do more harm.”

In her news release, Stephan noted that there has been an increase in juvenile crimes in the county over the past couple of years. Juvenile cases referred from police increased 13% from 2022 to 2023, she said, and cases filed increased 19% from 2022 to 2023.

But Ridolfi and others said that those numbers, which came from the DA’s internal case management system, can be misleading, and it is better to look at long-range trends. 

Those show a steady decline in juvenile crime. 

Data from the state Department of Justice showed juvenile felony arrests in the county declined 35% over the past decade. Arrests for violent crimes declined 10.5%.

“The long term trends are still that the number of young people who are being arrested is still going way down,” Ridolfi said. While there has been an “uptick” in San Diego the past couple of years, “if you look at the long term trend the numbers are dramatically lower,” she said.

Others objected to Stephan’s statement that youths would “escape accountability” in the juvenile system. 

“I would take issue with the idea that the juvenile court system is a lenient system,” said Riya Saha Shah, senior managing director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, a nonprofit public interest law firm focusing on juvenile law. 

“It is not a lenient system. Children suffer immense harm and trauma being exposed to the juvenile court system.” 

From East Mesa to Arizona

The Bureau of Prison has just three juvenile facilities scattered in Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. The BOP website said it contracts with local governments and private entities to provide “care, programming and recreational activity to juvenile persons.”

For now, at least one of the youths is being held in a federal facility in Florence, Arizona. The relative who spoke with inewsource said that the youth was initially held in a San Diego facility, likely the East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility in Otay Mesa. 

One night FBI agents came to the facility and after searching the youth’s cell, blindfolded him and transported him to Arizona. The relative said the family found out only through the youth’s new, federally appointed lawyer that he was now going to be prosecuted in the federal courts.

Federal regulations prohibit mixing juveniles with adults in BOP facilities. The relative said that the youth spends 23 hours in his cell, allowed out for an hour of recreation. He does not receive any schooling or other programs, according to this relative. 

If they were to be convicted in federal court, the two youths would be among the rarest of federal inmates. 

Data from the Bureau of Prisons show that out of 158,000 total federal inmates, just 11 of them are younger than 18.