Rule 33.Transfer of venue

Rule 33 moves a juvenile case to the child's home county, and it offers two moments to do it.

Pre-adjudicatory transfer

On the filing of a petition involving a child who is a resident of another county in the State, the judge may direct immediate transfer to the county where the child resides — on two conditions:

• the child has returned to his home; and
• it appears that the petitioner and local witnesses will not be inconvenienced.

The second condition is what keeps the rule balanced. The child's convenience does not automatically outweigh that of the people who brought the case and must testify in it.

Where transfer is ordered, a copy of the order along with all other documents and papers in the file is forwarded to the receiving county's court and is received and processed as if filed initially there. The case does not arrive as a transferred fragment; it arrives whole.

Post-adjudicatory transfer

If the judge decides an immediate transfer should not be made, an adjudicatory hearing is held, and the case is not dismissed, the judge may order its transfer to the county of the child's residence for disposition.

So the choice is not once-and-for-all. A court may keep the case for adjudication — where the witnesses are — and send it home for disposition, where the services, the family and the supervision are. That is often the sensible split.

One consequence elsewhere

Rule 37 normally requires the judge who presided at the adjudicatory hearing to preside at the dispositional hearing. It names Rule 33(b) as an exception, and this is why: a case transferred after adjudication will be disposed of by a judge in the receiving county.