Appeal
from the District Court, Fourth Judicial District, Bethel,
Dennis P. Cummins, Judge, and Bruce Ward, Magistrate Judge.
Trial Court No. 4BE-11-1326 CR
Kelly
R. Taylor, Assistant Public Defender, and Quinlan Steiner,
Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant.
Donald
Soderstrom, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Criminal
Appeals, Anchorage, and Craig W. Richards, Attorney General,
Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Mannheimer, Chief Judge, Allard, Judge, and Suddock,
Superior Court Judge. [*]
OPINION
SUDDOCK Judge.
Elizabeth
Watson was charged with driving under the influence (DUI)
when she was fourteen years old.[1] Pursuant to AS 47.12.030(b),
she was tried as an adult and convicted in the district
court. In this appeal, Watson argues that the
legislature's decision to uniformly prosecute minors as
adults when they commit misdemeanor traffic offenses violates
a minor's right to equal protection and to due process of
law.
Because
a minor has a limited interest in being prosecuted in the
juvenile court system, and because driving is a heavily
regulated dangerous adult activity, we conclude that the
legislature can validly require that minors be prosecuted as
adults for misdemeanor traffic offenses.
Watson's
equal protection and due process claims
Under
subsection (b) of AS 47.12.030, a minor who is accused of a
non-felony traffic offense "shall be charged,
prosecuted, and sentenced in the district court in the same
manner as an adult."
Watson
argues that minors who commit traffic offenses are presumably
as amenable to rehabilitation as are juveniles who commit
non-traffic misdemeanors. Watson notes that if she had
committed a more serious crime such as a non-traffic felony,
she might well have been prosecuted as a juvenile. Thus,
according to Watson, the legislature violated the equal
protection clause of the Alaska Constitution when it required
that minors be prosecuted as adults for misdemeanor traffic
offenses.[2]
We
analyze Watson's equal protection claim under
Alaska's three-part "sliding-scale" test. We
first determine the importance of the individual interest
that Watson claims has been impaired by the legislature. We
next examine the importance of the asserted government
interest protected by the challenged statute. And finally, we
evaluate the statute's effectiveness in implementing this
underlying interest-its means-to-end fit.[3]
In
Gray v. State, [4] we rejected an equal protection
challenge to subsection (a) of AS 47.12.030, which mandates
adult prosecution for minors charged with certain serious
felonies. Regarding the first step of the three-part analysis
- i.e., identifying a minor's interest in being
prosecuted as a juvenile rather than as an adult-we held that
juveniles have "no constitutional right to be tried in a
juvenile court."[5] Rather, a juvenile's interest in
avoiding prosecution as an adult implicates only "the
relatively narrow interest of a convicted offender in
minimizing the punishment for an offense."[6]Thus, we
concluded, the challenged statute would be constitutional as
long as it was supported by a legitimate governmental
purpose.[7]
Watson
argues that our decision in Gray is not
determinative, because minors who commit traffic offenses (as
opposed to serious felonies) have a weightier interest in
being prosecuted as juveniles - i.e., being
prosecuted under a system that emphasizes the individual
rehabilitation of offenders. Watson contends that minors who
commit misdemeanor traffic offenses are presumably just as
amenable to rehabilitative treatment as the minors who commit
other types of crimes and who are subject to juvenile
jurisdiction. According to Watson, the legislature's
decision to prosecute juvenile traffic offenders as adults is
"uniquely harsh" and merits more than minimal
scrutiny.
But
rehabilitation of minors convicted of traffic offenses is not
the sole governmental interest at stake. The legislature has
a strong and legitimate interest in "establishing
penalties for criminal offenders and in determining how those
penalties should be applied to various classes of convicted
[defendants]."[8] Driving is a highly regulated and
substantially dangerous adult activity. Minors are presumably
less experienced than other drivers, and the legislature
could rationally conclude that they pose a particularly
significant threat to their own and the public's safety.
Thus, the legislature has a legitimate and weighty ...