any definitive guidance on this issue. At first blush, three short appellate decisions appear to possibly address this issue, People v Crosby (105 AD2d 844 [2d Dept 1984]), People v Vazquez (234 AD2d 572 [2d Dept 1996]), and People v Johnson (244 AD2d 573 [2d Dept 1997]). Although each of these cases tantalizingly suggests that since the defendant was over the age of 16 at the time of the questioning the statutory parental notification requirements were not applicable, none of the holdings specifically identifies the defendant as a juvenile offender. Unfortunately, further research into the briefs and transcripts underlying each case reveals that all defendants were over the age of 16 for all relevant purposes and were neither arrested nor charged as juvenile offenders. The Court of Appeals decision in People v Salaam (83 NY2d 51 [1993]) does provide some limited analogous guidance. In this case, a police detainee held himself out to be 16 years of age when arrested by the police for a crime allegedly committed that same day, and reasonably appeared to be so. While the police were questioning him, his mother arrived at the precinct, and was initially denied access to her son. It was only after she informed the police that her son was really only 15 years old, and he verified this fact, that the police ceased questioning him, and permitted him to meet with his mother. The Court of Appeals upheld this police conduct in preventing the mother from seeing the detainee when she first arrived, because the police "reasonably believed that they were dealing with an adult and, therefore, were lawfully questioning him alone" (at 56 [emphasis supplied]). Applying this analysis to the case at bar suggests that a police detainee over the age of 16 may be regarded as an adult for all purposes, including the inapplicability of Family Court Act § 305.2.
This court must therefore essentially rely upon its own interpretation of Family Court Act § 305.2, as informed by the analysis of the precedent statute in Jimmy T. (supra), the rules of statutory construction and the limited analogous case law. In so doing, this court must compare the plain language of each relevant statute and consider the legislative and philosophical changes that have occurred in the juvenile justice system over the last quarter century.
This process leads to only one conclusion. The court reaffirms the continued viability of both the holding and the analysis of Jimmy T. (supra) in this, the first decade of the 21st century. It is not simply that 25 years have passed. Even after consideration of the profound statutory changes and the fundamental modifications in daily practice that have taken place since that time, the analysis of Jimmy T. remains jurisprudentially sound. The result therefore remains the same. Wherefore, this court denies the respondent's motion to suppress all statements upon this ground. [1] The controlling statute in 1979, Family Court Act § 724, defined the duties of a peace officer after taking a juvenile into custody, or having a youth delivered to his/her custody by a private person. S/he was required to immediately notify the parent or other person legally responsible for his/her care, or the person with whom s/he is domiciled, that s/he has been taken into custody. As acknowledged by the court in Matter of Jimmy T., Family Court Act § 724 cross-referenced to Family Court Act §§ 723 and 722. The court (at 625) also recognized that "[a]ll these sections refer to and are applicable to persons under the age of 16 who are taken into custody." (Emphasis supplied.) The court went on to add that "[t]he Court of Appeals, in People v Stephen J.B. (23 NY2d 611, 616) . . . correctly observed in a footnote: `[s]ection 724 of the Family Court Act requires that the parents of a child under 16 years be advised of his arrest, but by its express terms does not apply to defendant who was over 16 years of age at the time of his arrest.'" [2] A juvenile offender is a person at least 14 years of age (or at least 13 years of age if arrested for second degree murder) and not yet 16 years of age who is arrested for the alleged commission of one or more of certain very serious felonies, defined in the Criminal Procedure Law and Penal Law. Such juvenile offenders are liable for prosecution in the adult criminal justice system. (See CPL 1.20 [42]; Penal Law § 10.00 [18]; § 30.00 [2].) [3] The court additionally acknowledges that under certain circumstances, a calculated police strategy to isolate a detainee over the age of 16 from his/her family after s/he expresses a desire for such contact implicates that detainee's potential access to an attorney and therefore is impermissible. (People v Kern, 75 NY2d 638 [1990]; People v Bevilacqua, 45 NY2d 508 [1978]; People v Townsend, 33 NY2d 37 [1973].) Factually, however, this authority clearly does not apply to the case at bar. No such calculated strategy was revealed at the pretrial Huntley hearing. The respondent's mother was present at the precinct, albeit not in the same room, and he made no request or demand to speak with her, either prior to or during the interrogation at issue. [4] New York's juvenile justice system has undergone fundamental change in the last 25 years. It has become increasingly adversarial and formal in its procedure. For example, pretrial suppression hearings, commonplace in today's delinquency practice, were rarely conducted in 1979. Comprehensive pretrial discovery has replaced its rudimentary predecessor. Indeed, the State Legislature enacted a new juvenile delinquency code in 1983, now embodied in article 3 of the Family Court Act. Despite such significant changes, however, there is simply no additional case law guidance — on either the trial or appellate level — on facts that are essentially identical to Jimmy T. to inform this court's decision on this issue.