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URBANA — A number of juvenile cases involving gun violence have drawn attention this year, but the legal proceedings and fallout may be more difficult to follow than in other high-profile crimes.

Other than the most severe cases, the system is designed to give juveniles and their families numerous chances to handle negative behavior outside of court, even if it could be considered criminal.

“I believe that these are some of the most important cases, because you’re talking about young people, and the goal is to get them out of the criminal-justice system and moving forward positively,” Champaign County State’s Attorney Julia Rietz said.

The priority, as both Rietz and Public Defender Elisabeth Pollock see it, is preventing those young people from eventually ending up in the “regular” justice system, as happened to Marquise McGuire, who last month was sentenced to 32 years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in a March 2023 shooting in Urbana that happened when both he and the victim were 16.

“I’m forever seeing the good in people. I’m forever seeing the opportunity to grow and change and reform and rehabilitate,” Pollock said. “There are so many factors that go into why criminality exists that are not based in any way off of a person’s own violent tendency.

“It’s environmental exposure and other factors that I don’t think should doom a person at the age of 16.”

Rietz describes the juvenile-justice system as a series of steps in a staircase, each correlating to a different level of enforcement.

“We don’t usually actually get to court until a lot of other interventions have failed and the kid is moving up the staircase,” she said.

Earlier steps often correlate with more minor offenses, like a child stealing a candy bar, or “status offenses,” which might include truancy, curfew violations or running away.

Status offenses are considered criminal for juveniles, but wouldn’t be for adults.

In either case, law-enforcement officers will typically handle these events on scene or by returning the juvenile to their parents, rather than making arrests or pursuing charges.

The next few levels of enforcement involve programs similar to probation, in which the juvenile promises to follow certain conditions, possibly including consistent school attendance, counseling and public-service hours.

In many cases, a school employee or law-enforcement officer will recommend those cases to the Champaign County Youth Assessment Center, which will handle the conditions.

“If they complete it successfully, then the case does not come to my office, and they’ve remained at the bottom of the staircase,” Rietz said.

In others, the case will go through the state’s attorney’s office and the juvenile will be charged, but if they successfully complete probation, the charges will be dismissed.

Most of those cases are still lower-level offenses.

Rietz said repeat offenders or juveniles who commit more serious offenses, such as those involving gun violence or assault, are the ones who usually end up at the top of the staircase, facing actual adjudication.

Juvenile cases can go to trial just like adult cases, but they are bench trials where a judge, not a jury, renders the verdict.

This has to do with the continued goal of protecting the juvenile’s identity, but it can affect how attorneys on both sides of a case prepare for the trial.

“I think it’s always easier to try to find one out of 12 people to agree with your position than it is to find one out of one person to agree with your position,” Pollock said.

The very top step of the staircase leads to adult court.

In some cases, prosecutors can file for a “discretionary transfer” to adult court, based on the offense itself, the surrounding circumstances and the juvenile’s record.

Certain circumstances lead to mandatory transfers to adult court.

If a juvenile is older than 16 and charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm or aggravated criminal sexual assault, that case must be filed in adult court.

Sentencing options

If, when their trial concludes, a juvenile is found guilty of an offense, sentencing options look very different than in adult cases.

Adult sentences might include non-prison options such as probation or community services, but many felony convictions involve a mandatory minimum of time in the Department of Corrections.

Juveniles can also face probation, but they don’t typically face time in a standard prison.

Instead, they could be sentenced to time in the Juvenile Detention Center or the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Rietz said the maximum sentence at the detention center is 30 days, and lengths for sentences in the DOJJ determined not by the court but the department, which bases the length of their stay on their behavior.

No sentence last past the age of 21, and Rietz said most end up being fairly short.

“It’s a source of frustration,” she said. “Similar to the adult system, the number of juvenile parole officers and the amount of cases they have and the distance they have to travel is not appropriate.”

Pollock likewise described juvenile probation officers as having “a lot to do with what seems like never enough resources.”

An alternative to juvenile prison in some cases, a final step in that “staircase” comes from Redeploy Illinois, which funds a program through Cunningham Children’s Home in Urbana.

Both Pollock and Rietz praised that program, which provides resources to juveniles as well as their families, including general counseling, substance-abuse counseling, transportation, housing and food assistance.

All of those resources aim not only to help the juveniles comply with court orders but also address the problems that may have led to them committing crimes in the first place.

“The families are sometimes not in a position to be supportive of their children’s recovery, because they have to do things like work and they can’t be at home all the time to supervise,” Pollock said. Redeploy Illinois “provides these other opportunities.”

Redeploy Illinois is the same program that supports Champaign County Drug Court and offers similar opportunities for juveniles to complete intensive programs and have juvenile prison sentences dismissed.

‘Charge the parents’

Rietz said when news of juvenile delinquency reaches the public, she often hears calls to charge the parents of the minor involved.

From a legal standpoint, that is not feasible, she said.

“Well, there has to be a crime that they’ve committed, and there is no crime to charge because your kid committed a crime,” Rietz said.

One offense that may appear to be charging a parent for a child’s crime involves access to firearms.

If a parent, guardian or other person responsible for a child under the age of 14 stores a firearm in such a way that the child could reasonably have access to and be able to use it, that adult can be charged with a Class C misdemeanor.

Rietz said this concept comes up sometimes when minors are involved in gun-related crimes, but the statute itself relates to fairly specific circumstances.

The entire concept of charging parents for appearing to irresponsibly allow their children to be involved in criminal behavior is complicated, she said, because the circumstances that lead to criminal behavior are complicated.

Pollock described criminality, especially for young people, as having to do with “opportunity.”

Using herself as an example, Pollock said for someone who grows up in the middle class, primary life choices as a child and teen have to do with which extracurricular activities to participate in or which summer camps to go to. But for someone with a less stable home life or less financial privilege, it’s not so easy.

“Is committing a crime a choice? Yeah, it is,” she said. “You made the choice to either hang out with the gang at the corner because they were going to treat you like a brother and they were going to provide you with food and camaraderie and self-esteem and things to do, or you could have starved.

“Those are your choices. … People make choices, and they’re not the best choices, but if you look at the universe of choices they have, it’s not hard to understand why some of them make the choices that they do.”

Rietz also said many of the juveniles who appear in court have ties to other cases, whether they be other juvenile or adult cases.

While she said the term “gang violence” brings up misleading ideas about organized crime, it is true that various groups form based on commonalities like location, relation or something else.

Real or perceived disagreements between those groups can lead to conflict, which can lead to violence, just like in many situations involving adults.

By the numbers

Both Pollock and Rietz shared warnings about looking at statistics on local juvenile delinquency without a critical eye.

Rietz pointed out that with so many steps in the juvenile-justice system revolving around avoiding filing charges or dismissing any charges filed, total counts appear much lower than the number of potentially criminal incidents that occurred.

Conversely, Pollock said that the counts she can provide appear to be much higher than the actual number of incidents that occurred in the county.

That’s because when a juvenile moves into the county, their probation case moves in too, appearing as a new case filed in Champaign County.

Pollock also said that numbers involving the Department of Children and Family Services can appear inflated because new cases are sometimes created for each child or each parent involved.

With all of those factors in mind, it still appears that there has not been a notably higher rate of juvenile delinquency in Champaign County in 2025 compared with previous years.

There have been 85 cases filed in the first seven months of 2025, not counting any that were automatically filed in adult court.

Pollock also noted that while she can’t share any of the defendants’ names, some are involved in more than one case.

That’s higher than 2023 or 2024, which each had 62 cases filed between January and July, but comparable to most prior years.

A decade ago, in 2015, there had been 147 juvenile delinquency cases filed by the end of July.

Of the 85 cases filed this year, 20 involved firearms or ammunition.