North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has vetoed a bill that would have expanded the number of crimes for which minors could be charged as adults in the state.
“Most violent crimes, even when committed by teenagers, should be handled in adult court,” Mr. Cooper said in a press release announcing the veto.
“However, there are cases where sentences would be more effective and appropriate to the severity of the crime for teenagers if they were handled in juvenile court, making communities safer. This bill makes this important option highly unlikely and begins to erode our bipartisan ‘Raise the Age’ law we agreed to four years ago.”
Mr. Cooper cited concerns that, if passed, the new legislation would keep some minors from getting appropriate treatment.
He said lawmakers should instead focus on investing in the juvenile court system “to ensure resources are available to help prevent crimes and appropriately deal with children who break the law.”
The RTA legislation, which had bipartisan support, went into effect in 2019 and prohibits 16- and 17-year-olds from being automatically charged in the adult criminal justice system.
The law still requires that minors who have been charged with Class A to G felonies be tried in adult court. These include charges such as murder, rape, kidnapping, and armed robbery.
“Studies show that once a child is in adult court, they are more likely to stay in adult court and experience all the collateral consequences that come with it,” the ACLU said.
Possible Issues With Offenders
Jon Guze, a senior fellow in legal studies at the John Locke Foundation—an independent research institute in North Carolina—told The Epoch Times that when the RTA bill was enacted, North Carolina and New York were the only states in the nation that still tried 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.The problem is that minors are still capable of patterned criminal behavior, and by raising the age for trying an individual as an adult, it opens the door for younger criminals to be too easily released from the system to cause more problems, Mr. Guze said.
He said he was “somewhat skeptical” that the bill proposing the updates would have made a “big difference in terms of kids still doing violent crimes on the street.”
There was always a provision in the original law to allow judges to transfer cases to adult jurisdiction if they thought that was appropriate, he said.
What will make a difference, he said, is better enforcement.
New York’s ‘Raise the Age’
According to a 2021 report from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, 48 percent of the 16-year-olds arrested in the first year after the legislation was passed were arrested again.Thirty-five percent were rearrested for a felony, while 27 percent were rearrested for a violent felony offense (VFO).
The report concluded that more 16-year-olds were arrested in the first year the RTA legislation went into effect than during the previous year. The number of 16-year-olds arrested was also higher than the number of 17-year-olds arrested in the same year or the previous year, before RTA went into effect.
Even taking into account race, gender, criminal background, and the severity of the charges, 16-year-olds arrested during the first year of RTA “were less likely to survive without re-arrest than were those in any of the comparison age/year groups,” the report said.
The report stated that over-policing doesn’t explain the higher number of arrests because during that first year, there was also a decrease in misdemeanor arrests for young offenders.
“There were fewer arrests of 16- and 17-year-olds for marijuana charges, theft of services, petit larceny and criminal trespass, reflecting a change in NYPD policy,” the report said.
