A key committee has once again voted to delay the next phase of Vermont’s Raise the Age law.
Only months ago, Democrats looked driven to forge ahead with the juvenile justice initiative after years of repeated delays. But after calls from Gov. Phil Scott and his top public safety officials to nix the legislation altogether, lawmakers appear to be seeking middle ground.
“It’s a compromise bill,” Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told his colleagues about H.2 before Friday’s vote on the bill.
The legislation the House Judiciary Committee backed Friday in a 7-2-2 vote does more than just delay Raise the Age. The bill also proposes increasing the age at which kids can be charged with juvenile offenses from 10 to 12.
The entire House will consider H.2 when lawmakers return from next week’s week-long Town Meeting Day break.
Currently, the Raise the Age law, passed in 2018, allows 18-year-olds charged with misdemeanors and lower level felonies to have their cases heard in family court. Unlike criminal court, family court records are not available to the public. And rather than a punitive purpose, juvenile proceedings in the family division allow for more flexible, rehabilitative resolutions.
Without legislative action, the initiative will expand to include 19-year-olds as of April. But lawmakers are now poised to kick that can down the road, something they’ve done again and again since 2022 — this time for two years.
Scott and his administration have said that the first-in-the-nation program does not provide enough accountability for alleged offenders and is moving too quickly. Last month, the governor called for the expansion of Raise the Age to be repealed entirely, not just delayed. Prosecutors and judges already have options available to steer young adults out of the criminal system, opponents of Raise the Age argued.
“This is an unnecessary diversion of (Department for Children and Family) resources from the younger age groups where these resources are most needed,” Jaye Johnson, Scott’s chief counsel, said in January, outlining the governor’s opposition to the continued expansion of Raise the Age.
DCF’s ability — or lack thereof — to take on 19-year-old clients has been central to the administration’s advocacy against Raise the Age. Democrats, however, have been skeptical, suggesting the department has chosen to be willfully unprepared for the next phase in the initiative.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told DCF officials in December that it sounded like “purposeful Groundhog Day” that the department wasn’t prepared for the next phase.
“My working assumption,” he said at December’s Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee meeting, “is that the administration is committed not to putting this law in place.”
Advocates argue Raise the Age provides protections to help young people change course for the better, shielding them from having their lives derailed by a criminal record. They cite neuroscience that indicates young people’s brains continue changing well into their 20s.
Yet this year, as lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee considered what to do about Raise the Age and the pending April expansion, even supporters of juvenile justice reform expressed skepticism about whether the moment was ripe for the change.
“We don’t want to go forward in an environment where people feel unprepared and where expansion is essentially doomed to failure,” Marshall Pahl, Vermont’s top juvenile public defender, told the committee.
Still, Pahl described Raise the Age as “a really good plan,” and said it’s already working well for 18-year olds. That the state isn’t ready for expansion, Pahl suggested, is disappointing.
“We thought that we would be in that place by now,” he said.
Other advocates questioned whether treating 19-year-olds charged with lower level offenses as juveniles would really overwhelm state resources.
In fiscal year 2024, 19-year-olds in Vermont picked up 35 felony charges — 16 that would be covered by Raise the Age — and 195 misdemeanors, according to Amy Davenport, a retired judge who now serves on the Vermont Council for Equitable Youth Justice. It is an “error,” she told lawmakers, to believe all of those charges would require supervision from DCF.
Read the story on VTDigger here: With key committee vote, Vermont’s ‘Raise the Age’ law looks destined for another delay.