This Winnipeg court is trying to fix how it handles its youngest offenders — one kid at a time

The charge before the court was assault, the accused a 14-year-old girl in black-and-white Nikes. It was her first time being charged with a crime, and she felt her nerves bubble up inside her as she walked through the heavy wooden doors into a courtroom on the fourth floor of Winnipeg's towering law courts building. The only time she'd seen something like this was in the movies.

She grabbed a seat near the back and watched as the room filled up with other young people like her, more and more filing in until the gallery in Courtroom 402 on the March Monday morning was a sea of basketball shoes and sweatpants, high-tops and jeans. 

Some, like her, were there with a social worker. Others were with their families, younger siblings clutching their mothers' hands. Some were completely alone.

"Order, all rise," the clerk said, and the young faces in the room snapped forward to see Manitoba provincial court Associate Chief Judge Lee Ann Martin enter in a black judicial robe, taking a seat at the front of the courtroom as lawyers in suits stood waiting.

The girl's case was number 12 on the docket, and as she listened for her name to be called she wondered what was going to happen to her after what she'd done.

It happened at the group home she was living in last year, she said, back when she was 13 and struggling with an alcohol addiction that once sent her to the hospital. The girl (who can't be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act) got drunk one day. Scared and angry, she ended up punching one of the workers in her group home and getting hauled to the police station.

But that wasn't her life anymore. She'd been able to stop drinking. Stayed out of trouble. She'd even gotten ahead of schedule in coursework at her alternative school.

Good things happen when you're doing good things, her social worker reminded her on the way to court that morning. 

And as they sat beside each other in the courtroom that day, the assault charge hanging over them both, they waited to see if it was true.

As it turned out, the lawyers and judge they found themselves with had also been trying to start fresh — with a new type of court created for young people just like her, in the hopes of keeping them from ending up back in the justice system by welcoming them into it right from the beginning.

The change had been a long time coming, as it became clear something just wasn't working in Winnipeg's youth court system. 

For one thing, the cases seemed to be getting more complicated. Over a few years, the number of cases that required what's known as a conference — a helpful but resource-intensive type of meeting that brings together everyone in a young person's life, from guardians and kookums to teachers and action therapists, to help find solutions in their case — went from just under half to nearly every case, Associate Chief Judge Martin said in an interview.

Many cases were also taking so long that by the time they appeared before a judge, the young person involved had already given up on coming to court at all — leading to more charges against them. Most, if not all, of the young people showing up to court were dealing with heavy issues that had likely led them there in the first place, from mental illness to addiction to poverty to trauma.

"It just begged the question: what is going on, and what do we need to do to assist?" the judge said. "To make sure that the youth criminal justice system is working better, and that we're contributing to some solutions?"