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POLICY BRIEF article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Forensic and Legal Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1414305
This article is part of the Research Topic Applying cognitive and social psychology to the legal system: What we know today and what is next View all 7 articles

“… give me a lawyer, dawg”: Recognizing youthful pleas for advice and support

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Iowa State University, Ames, United States
  • 2 University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    1. Youth are particularly vulnerable to making suboptimal legal decisions due to added challenges in comprehension, as well as their ongoing neurological development. 2. This fact is especially problematic in our system of pleas, which frequently expects defendants to determine the outcome of their own cases (by accepting or rejecting plea offers). 3. To better ensure that guilty pleas entered by youthful defendants are indeed knowing, intelligent, and voluntary, legal counsel should be mandatory during any and all juvenile criminal proceedings. 4. Further, an additional “translator” (similar to a guardian ad litem), who has specialized training in developmental psychology, should be present to effectively counsel and support youth defendants who might otherwise fail to comprehend the advice of their attorneys (and other court actors).

    Keywords: Legal Decision Making, guilty pleas, False guilty pleas, adjudication, Juvenile crime

    Received: 12 Apr 2024; Accepted: 20 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wilford and Frazier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Miko M. Wilford, Iowa State University, Ames, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.