When can Wyoming children be treated like adults in court?

A Campbell County court sentenced 16-year-old Michael Frank Seiser to at least 20 years in prison in 2007 for his involvement in murders orchestrated by Kent Proffit, an adult. 

Though Seiser was a minor at the time, the teen was charged in adult court, meaning court proceedings were public, and he wasn’t entitled to protections under Wyoming’s Juvenile Justice Act. Juvenile courts are confidential and offer rehabilitative services specific to youth. 

It’s not unusual for Wyoming kids to be treated as adults in court when the crimes they are charged with are as serious as those in the Proffit cases, as they came to be called. “You’ll recall that one of the victims was strangled to death. It was absolutely a tortured homicide. And the other one was shot to death,” John Perry, the district judge who presided over the case, said. 

But youth charged with lesser offenses can also be funneled through adult courts. 

In 2018, 14-year-old Dale Warner brought a loaded gun with extra bullets to his junior high school in Gillette, planning to shoot students and staff. He was disarmed after a student reported his plans to school officials. 

Warner was charged as an adult and ultimately pleaded guilty to assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent. He also pleaded no contest to a count of aggravated assault and battery. 

State public defenders attempted to have Warner’s case transferred to juvenile court, noting that Warner had been in emotional pain after his biological father died just a few days before the incident. But the Campbell County District Court denied the request, and the Wyoming Supreme Court later affirmed that decision.

Young people in Wyoming are also often processed as adults through misdemeanor courts. All in all, data has shown that just a small minority of youth who come into contact with Wyoming’s justice system are served by juvenile courts. 

There are a number of downsides for kids to be tried in adult courts. Proceedings in adult court aren’t confidential, so a charge could impact a kid for the rest of their life. Sentences are also generally more severe in adult courts than they are in juvenile courts. More broadly, the goals between the juvenile and adult court systems are different. Whereas juvenile courts focus on treatment, training and rehabilitation, the adult justice system is more focused on punishment and deterrence. 

“The delta between these aims produces greater risks for children forced to navigate the adult system, including fewer procedural safeguards and exponentially higher possible punishments,” Casper attorney Ryan Semerad, who frequently works on cases involving youth, wrote in a petition to move a client’s case to juvenile court. 

Wyoming’s juvenile courts

The Wyoming Legislature created separate juvenile courts in 1947 through the Wyoming Juvenile Justice Act. The law says the purpose of the juvenile court system is, among other things, to provide treatment and rehabilitation to help kids become “functioning and contributing adults.”

But unlike most states, Wyoming lacks a unified juvenile court system, instead taking a county-by-county approach that results in different treatment for youth based on where they live. 

What’s more, because some parts of the state don’t have juvenile courts, many young people are processed through misdemeanor courts, where they don’t have protections under the state’s juvenile justice act, according to a 2010 Wyoming ACLU report. The report estimated that at the time, 10-15% of youth appeared in juvenile court, while the other 85-90% went through adult courts. 

It’s unclear if those numbers still hold true. Such information is difficult to collect because it exists across disparate systems, or isn’t tracked by agencies at all. Legislation that would allow the Department of Family Services to synthesize such data from multiple systems has repeatedly failed to become law. 

Wyoming laws also have a narrow definition of “status offenses,” which ends up funneling more kids into adult courts. These are offenses that are crimes because of a person’s age — underage drinking, for instance. In Wyoming, some common alcohol offenses, for example, aren’t considered status offenses, but crimes, according to a 2017 Wyoming Law Review article. That means kids who are convicted of these offenses are treated as adults in adult court rather than kids in juvenile court who need treatment or rehabilitation. 

Who decides when kids go to adult court?

In most states, cases involving juveniles start out in juvenile court by default, and prosecutors have to then try to move them to adult court, Semerad explained. 

But in Wyoming, a lot of power is given to state prosecutors to decide whether a kid will be treated as an adult in court proceedings — they alone can decide right off the bat whether to charge a kid as an adult. It’s “purely a prosecutorial decision,” Perry said. “So the judges and the judiciary have no control over what gets filed where.” What’s more, judges in circuit or municipal courts don’t have authority to even transfer a child’s case to juvenile court — that authority is given to prosecutors. 

“Effectively, when we codified our Juvenile Justice Act, we created some mechanisms in there that just shoehorn all of the discretion to the prosecutor,” Semerad said. 

In district court, once a prosecutor decides to charge a kid as an adult, it’s on the defense attorney to ask the judge to transfer the case to juvenile court. When they do that, the proceedings are confidential, because they take place in front of a district court judge who’s sitting in a juvenile court capacity. 

In the case of Warner, the Gillette teen who brought a gun to school, for example, the evidentiary hearing on whether his case should be moved to juvenile court was the only proceeding in the matter that was kept confidential. 

“You can’t get any information about that, because that was a juvenile court proceeding,” Donna Sheen, the former executive director for the Wyoming Children’s Law Center, said. “So all of the wonderful evidence about how stellar the kid was and how this was just a momentary mental health break never got to the public.” 

Petitions to move cases to juvenile court

Wyoming statute provides a kind of “checklist” for attorneys and judges to go through when they’re analyzing whether a case should be in adult or juvenile court, Perry said. That checklist of seven factors asks them to consider, for example, the relative sophistication of the person involved in the crime and the seriousness of the crime. 

“In my experience over many years, the types of cases that usually get sent back [to juvenile court] are generally property crimes, sometimes controlled substance crimes. There’s no real fixed rule as to how those look,” Perry said. 

Steven Titus, a Gillette attorney, said that youth with a violent felony or who have any juvenile delinquency or adult criminal history are more often than not sent to adult court. 

In Semerad’s experience, there are typically two things that kill petitions to move cases involving minors to juvenile courts. If the charge is a violent felony, the seriousness of the crime usually weighs against sending it to juvenile court. Representatives from state agencies also often testify in favor of the prosecutor’s decision, Semerad said. “They always say, ‘We don’t have the resources to deal with someone with this kind of charge.’” 

It’s difficult to move cases to juvenile court, but not unheard of. Titus had a client charged with aggravated vehicular homicide whose case was originally charged in district court then transferred to juvenile court. “It’s not unheard of that a case can stay in the juvenile court for proceedings, but it is extremely rare,” Titus said. 

Semerad recently attempted unsuccessfully to move two of his clients’ cases to juvenile court. One case involved a Casper teen, Eavan Castaner, who shot and killed another youth in a park. Castaner, Semerad wrote, “struggled with mental illness and substance abuse as he ricocheted off close friends, romantic partners, and other avenues to escape his lived experience in a chaotic home.” 

“This is Defendant’s first exposure to the criminal justice system. And the State chose to have him face the most punitive version of that system for kids with the most serious charge available under Wyoming law,” he wrote. 

Another case involved a Casper teen, Gabriella Kathleen Aultman, who stabbed another youth at a Halloween party (the victim survived). Semerad wrote in his petition to move Aultman’s case to juvenile court that she was “navigating the complexities of teenage girlhood against the backdrop of a new and substantial mental health diagnosis, bipolar disorder, newly prescribed psychotropic medications, and an effort to have a fresh start at a new high school.” 

Diversion?

Juvenile courts may provide more youth-centered services, but in an ideal world, Sheen said she would like to see more options for keeping kids out of the court system entirely. 

“Courts aren’t the best avenue for changing behavior or shaping and managing behavior at that age,” she said. 

“I would love to see a statute that says if they commit a misdemeanor, you just divert them … into something that’s helpful. You provide programming. You work with schools to develop strategies for how you’re going to be changing that trajectory of a kid.” 

Although services aren’t uniform across the state, some Wyoming counties provide diversion programs for youth that give them a chance to avoid charges. The Juvenile Diversion Program in Teton County, for example, provides interventions for youth facing Circuit Court charges. The six-month program could involve community service hours, substance use counseling and therapy. Those who finish the program can have their charges dismissed.