Juvenile mother competency hearing
Q: In Juvenile Court, a competency hearing is being held for a young girl accused of abandoning her baby. The district attorney’s office has charged her with attempted murder and felony child abandonment.
Under WIC 676, the public should be allowed into the criminal proceedings. However, the DA’s office said the criminal proceedings have been suspended during the competency hearing. The judge has barred all media from the hearing and imposed a gag order on the defense and prosecution. The DA’s office said the media has been barred because the topic of the hearing is the juvenile’s medical history and mental health and she is entitled to privacy.
This being the case, is there any way I can get access to the hearings?
A: There is case law in California holding that Welfare & Institutions Code §676 does apply to competency hearings, so, under that statute, the proceedings in this case should be open unless the prosecution or the juvenile’s attorneys filed a motion to close the hearing and the judge – supposedly after giving the media time to object – finds a sufficiently compelling justification for closing the hearing. Typically, the grounds being asserted for closure here – medical history and mental health – would not justify closing the entire competency hearing.
Unfortunately, it is not unusual that a court and the parties fail to follow the proper procedures before closing a hearing. When that happens, the most common recourse is to file a motion to open the hearings and, if appropriate, unseal the records (and, in this case, perhaps also move to lift the gag order, although that can involve slightly different issues). We have filed motions like this in the past and they can be (but are not always) successful in convincing the judge to open the hearings.