New York State’s prosecutors and lawmakers are divided on proposals to raise the age at which criminal defendants are tried as adults, forestalling action as the state Legislature heads into session.
New York remains one of just two states where 16-year-olds accused of breaking the law automatically head into criminal court. A campaign to “raise the age” has been embraced by New York state’s chief judge, the influential Working Families Party and a wide swath of advocates statewide.
Assemblymember Joseph Lentol has sponsored a bill that competes with a proposal from New York State’s chief judge to transform criminal justice for defendants aged 16 and 17. AP Photo/Mike Groll
Two bills have been introduced in the state Assembly to increase the minimum age for adult trial from 16 to 18. One would raise the age for all but the most serious offenses; the other, for nonviolent crimes only.
Among the prosecutors who have supported the move of younger teens to a special youth court is the president of the New York District Attorneys Association, Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice. At an October rally in Albany, she declared that New York’s trying of young people as adults shows an “unconscionable disregard for basic brain science and what we know about adolescent development.”
But her statewide organization is not on board with the Assembly’s plans. Without strong support from law enforcement, lawmakers say, passage by the state Senate is unlikely.
Rice said in an interview that the DAs Association has not yet considered a stance on a proposal because there isn’t a consensus piece of legislation to review.
“Once there is, we will consider it and share our thoughts with lawmakers,” Rice said. “That said, myself and several other DAs have already voiced strong support for the broad goals of the campaign to raise the age of criminal responsibility, but I suspect other DAs may have differing views which we will consider and respect.”
Advocates for change are divided on which “raise the age” proposal to support. One originated with Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman in 2012, and would increase the age of criminal responsibility for minors who committed nonviolent offenses — a nod to officials worried about creating a climate of violent crime. Defendants as young as 13 accused of committing particularly heinous crimes such as murder would still be tried as adults. In 2010, 75 percent of arrests among 16- and 17-year-old New Yorkers were for misdemeanors, none of which are violent crimes.
Under Lippman’s proposal, 16- and 17-year-old criminal defendants would have their cases heard in a new Youth Court based in state Supreme and County Courts, in which specially trained judges, prosecutors and lawyers would work to keep certain cases out of the court system entirely, diverting them instead to probation and rehabilitation. And even defendants who ended up with a guilty plea or verdict would have no criminal conviction on their records.
Although his bill failed to go anywhere last year, Lippman has already initiated a pilot program in New York City, Buffalo and Syracuse, and in Nassau and Westchester counties. According to the Center for Court Innovation, which is evaluating the pilot, four out of five participants have complied with program requirements, and overall are less likely to be rearrested than young defendants who go through criminal court.
A second bill, sponsored by Brooklyn Assemblymember Joseph Lentol, would raise the age to 18 for all but those accused of the most serious offenses and steer younger teens’ cases to Family Court.
At a state Assembly hearing in Manhattan on Friday, retired state Supreme Court judge Michael Corriero pleaded with members to reach consensus around a single piece of legislation.
“We saddle children with a criminal record for their mistakes at a young age and we give them little room to reform,” testified Corriero, who is now executive director of the nonprofit New York Center for Juvenile Justice. “We need to move forward this session.”
Caught in New York’s time warp are defendants like Kalief Browder, who found himself behind bars at Rikers Island at age 16, unable to pay $10,000 bail on a robbery charge. Three years later, he was released, his case dismissed without explanation.
North Carolina is the only other state besides New York that continues to prosecute 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. Connecticut stopped the practice in 2010.
But while support is increasingly broad for reforming the system, repeated attempts to change the law in Albany haven’t gone anywhere — and this year is likely no different, reform backers in the Legislature admit.
“The Senate has never really wanted to take it up,” said Assemblymember Lentol. “If the people involved in the criminal justice system would get behind it — for example the District Attorneys Association or the police…. If they threw their weight behind this I think it would be easier to pass the Senate.”
Lentol’s bill addresses a widely held view among criminal justice reform advocates that Lippman’s bill does not go far enough.
“Why should we go for the really low-hanging fruit?” said Glenn Martin, executive director of the nonprofit Fortune Society, which focuses on helping former prisoners re-enter society. “As opposed to what we know we should be doing, which is to treat children like children.”
A bipartisan swath of legislators see Lippman’s bill as a realistic first step, given the tough-on-crime philosophy generally held by Senate Republicans. The current law dates to the late 1970s, when a 15-year-old named Willie Bosket Jr. was sentenced to just five years in prison after murdering two people in the subway system, sparking public outrage and prompting the legislature to pass a law establishing adulthood at age 13 for all murder cases, 14 for major felonies and leaving it at 16 for all other crimes, as it has been since the 19th century. Through the 1990s, laws allowing for the prosecution of minors as adults were expanded across the United States.
But today there is a broad consensus among scientists that the 16-year-old brain is far from fully developed — age 25 is now thought to be closer to when the brain fully matures. And studies have shown that treating minors as adults has not led to a decrease in juvenile crime. The practice of sending minors through the adult prison system is now widely seen as nothing more than a way to ruin their chances of ever becoming upstanding citizens: adult felony convictions, unlike juvenile ones, are open to the public and prevent individuals from applying for certain jobs and loans.
Unlike in the adult system, youthful offenders in juvenile correctional facilities engage in programs designed to steer them back on track. The combined results of six studies reviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection in 2007 showed the median recidivism rate to be 34 percent higher among minors sentenced to adult prisons than those sentenced to juvenile facilities.
“A young person’s life can be destroyed because they made a bad decision at 16 and wound up in the prison pipeline,” said Paige Pierce, executive director of the nonprofit Families Together for New York State. “Ultimately they aren’t able to get college loans, they aren’t able to get employment in many places…these kids end up in the prison pipeline at the age of 16 and come out of ‘criminal university’ with no skills and fewer opportunities for employment and education.”
County officials have also raised concerns over the cost of changing the system, especially to county probation departments, which would take on many more cases if the law were changed. First Deputy Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks of the Office of Court Administration testified on Friday that the latest version of the bill would reimburse county probation departments for their costs.
At the hearing, Assemblymember Lentol warned that Lippman’s bill would close off the possibility of strengthening the law in the future. “My fear is that if that were the proposal we adopted, that would be the end of it,” Lentol said. “The other house would think they’d done their bit.”
But in an interview prior to the hearing he indicated he would be happy to see Lippman’s initiative pass. Lentol, a former prosecutor, is a sponsor of Lippman’s bill as well as his own measure.
“Mine happens to be the one that I’m sure most of the people who are supporting a bill believe should pass,” Lentol said. “But if we could get a foot in the door and allow the chief judge’s to pass just to have an experimental program on the books…we could see how well or how badly it works.”
