California’s Prop. 57 tackles sentencing of juvenile offenders and parole by KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area

Daniel Mendoza is starting classes at U.C. Davis as a junior and sociology major this fall. But just a few years ago, he was looking at life in prison for a long list of charges—including murder. How Daniel got from there to U.C. Davis is connected to California's Proposition 57.

When Mendoza was 14, he was hanging out with a rough crowd. One night, he and some friends jumped a man on the street. In the chaos, somebody pulled out a knife and stabbed the man. After a two month investigation, Daniel and his friends were arrested. In court, Mendoza found out that the D.A. had decided to direct file his case.

Direct Filed
Prosecutors can direct file cases at their discretion. That means they can decide whether defendants, as young as 14, should be tried in adult court. Studies from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that the use of direct file varies widely from county to county, from D.A. to D.A., and is biased against black and latinx defendants. The report found that black youth were 11.3 times more likely to be direct filed than white youth. This is one of the key things Prop 57 seeks to change.

"The race of the child and and the county in which he or she commit this crime will determine whether or not he’ll be direct filed, not the severity of the crime," says Frankie Guzman from the National Center of Youth Law "and that is not what we should be basing these decisions on."