The Maryland Supreme Court building. A former chief judge on the court says it’s past time for Maryland to revamp how it handles juvenile criminal trials. (File photo by Bennett Leckrone/Maryland Matters)
Over the past decade, Maryland legislators have missed several opportunities to curb our state’s lamentable policy of treating children accused of crime as if they were adults. This year, the issue is before state lawmakers once again as Senate Bill 422. We represent a large cohort of retired judges and magistrates who have joined together in our personal capacities to endorse this long-overdue legislation.
By passing SB422 and curbing the practice of automatically charging youths as adults, state legislators can make Maryland’s courts more effective, render their outcomes more just, leave streets and communities safer, and advance common sense over bias and cruelty.
The decision to try a child in adult court can have life-altering consequences and should be made very carefully, through a process that considers all of the circumstances of the case. Instead, for 33 different offenses, Maryland has automated this decision: Children are sent to adult court based solely upon the charges of the alleged crime, and judges weigh the circumstances only months later.
As a result, our state has become a national outlier. Maryland charges more children as adults per capita each year than every other state but Alabama. Six percent of all Maryland prisoners began serving their sentence while still a child — twice the national average.
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To be clear, SB 422 does not prevent a youth from being prosecuted as an adult in Maryland’s criminal courts. Instead, it simply ensures that most cases begin in juvenile court, where a judge can determine whether transfer to adult criminal court is appropriate.
This is a modest change. But it would bring Maryland much closer to well-established nationwide standards. The American Bar Association has asserted, for example, that waiver decisions should happen in juvenile court, and that adult courts may assert jurisdiction only after this waiver has occurred. Similarly, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges advises that the decision about whether a youth’s case should be transferred to adult criminal court is best made by a juvenile justice judge in a judicial hearing with the young person represented by qualified legal counsel.
Our opinion as former judges is based on these well-reasoned precedents and our decades of combined experience. However, it also draws upon the following fundamental truths.
First, Maryland’s juvenile justice system offers individualized, evidence-based rehabilitation to incarcerated youths to help them understand and change their behavior. Adult prisons, on the other hand, offer young people few, if any, rehabilitative opportunities.
Second, scientific studies repeatedly accepted and cited by the U.S. Supreme Court confirm that adolescent brains are still developing, making young people more likely to gain better judgment and behavior as they mature.
Third, the experience of being prosecuted as an adult can be traumatic and destabilizing, leaving young people prosecuted as adults more likely to commit future crimes, to do so more quickly, and for more serious offenses than similar youth handled in the juvenile justice system.
And finally, the current auto-charging system generates alarming racial disparities. Nearly 84% of youth charged as adults in Maryland are Black. Maryland’s African-American youth are seven times more likely to be criminally charged as adults compared to their white peers.
SB 422 is an important step toward ending our state’s unfair and counterproductive practice of overcharging youth in its adult criminal justice system. It is our sincere hope, drawing upon our deep reservoirs of experience and knowledge of the field, that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle will at last embrace this opportunity and vote to pass this bill.
Maryland is long overdue to make progress on this issue, so fundamental to justice, fairness, and safety.