Arrested and rehab.

GleasSpty
Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:17:53 +0000

Vesper: Police officers, to be quite honest, are just talking out of their ass. They want to scare you because they think it’s fun. I’m willing to bet they know next to nothing about college admissions. It could affect whether your accepted or not, but unless it’s rape or murder, they won’t throw your application away.

For both Vesper and Jmcatch742: do not mention this on your application. First of all, you were both minors and no matter what happens you can not be convicted. The correct term for juvenilles is “adjudicated.” If it’s the same way in your state, a lawyer should tell you that the legal, honest answer to the question “Have you ever been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony?” is no, unless it happened when you were 18. However, if a question asks were you put on probation, and you were, you “must” ansqer yes. “Must” meaning you’re supposed to, but off the record, I would not recommend saying yes to this. Furthermore, be careful of the wording. A lot of questions ask have you been placed on probation in regards to school, and most likely the answer is no. You were placed on probation for something that had asbolutley nothing to do with school, so once again the legal answer to this question would be no.
If the legal answer to any simliar question should be yes, you have a tough decsion. On one hand, if you completley ignore the question and put no, then you are risking them finding out that you lied about it, which will almost definitely deny you from a school, even one that’s not ultra selective. On the other hand, if you put yes you may be decreasing your chances so much that it would be worth the risk to put no.
To my knowledge, because you are juvenilles and the offenses were misdemeanors, the only court system that should have record of this was the county or whatever court system you were tried in. This means that if a univeristy wanted to find information about your legal record, they would have to directly contant your country court ssytem to obtain the records, and they are certainly not going to do this for every applicant they have. If this is the case, then there’s no point in saying yes. However, this I am not 100% sure of.
A question arises: if “convicted” does not apply to juvenilles, then why don’t they ask if you were “adjudicated” or “convicted”. To be honest, I don’t really have a good answer. My best guess is that they are either not legally allowed to ask questions to a minor, or to an adult regarding their legal history as a minor, but I’m not sure about this. I was also told that colleges ask this question, not so much for admissions purposes (because they expect people to lie), but if anything happens in the future when they want to kick you out for whatever reason, they can use the fact that you lied on your app to kick you out of the university, assuming they can dig up your legal record. Personally, I don’t really agree with the last thing I said, but that’s what I was told.

Hoped that helped.