Children’s Rights Litigation
Spring 2025, Volume 27, Issue 3
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© 2025 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any
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8
A Post–J.D.B. v. North Carolina Landscape of Youth
Custody Determinations
By Aashna Avachat – February 24, 2025
Movies and TV shows regularly show police officers giving suspects Miranda warnings (“You
have the right to remain silent; anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of
law. . . .”), but the police do not have to give these warnings to all suspects or even to everyone
they interrogate. Officers must give Miranda warnings only when they place a person in
“custody.” This is a legal determination. When dealing with children, courts must properly
assess whether youth feel free to terminate an encounter with police—which is to say, courts
must face the underlying question: Do youth, by virtue of the power difference exacerbated by
young age, ever feel free to terminate an encounter with police? Many adults are likely
unaware of the rights they can assert when questioned by law enforcement, so how can we
expect children to have this knowledge, especially when children are socially trained to obey
authority figures? Young people must be provided the opportunity to learn about and fully
understand their rights, but according to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is legal for officers to leave
children unaware as long as they are not technically in custody. And the line between custody
and a noncustodial “conversation” with law enforcement is legally blurry.
In J.D.B. v. North Carolina, 564 U.S. 261 (2011), the Supreme Court ruled that when the police
interrogate a child, the child’s age must be considered in determining whether the child was in
custody during the interrogation. This determination can have massive repercussions, because
when the police question someone without placing that person in custody, they need not warn
the person of his or her rights, and prosecutors can use anything the person said to police
against him or her in court. Young people are especially vulnerable to the pressures of a police
interrogation, in particular to false confessions. In 2013, the National Registry of Exonerations
reported that in the past 25 years, 38 percent of the exonerations of crimes allegedly
committed by youth involved false confessions. But the question of whether a young person’s
confession can be used against the young person in court depends entirely on the
circumstances surrounding police questioning, beginning with whether the young person was in
official police custody.
Before J.D.B., the standard to determine whether any person—including a child—was in
custody was a “totality of the circumstances” test. In this test, courts would look to whether a
reasonable person in the suspect’s shoes would have felt free to terminate the encounter with
the officers. If so, then the person was not in custody and therefore did not need to be
informed of his or her Miranda rights. In this “totality” analysis, courts often considered a broad
