The Maryland House Judiciary Committee heard from both sides on a bill that would change the conditions for automatically charging juveniles as adults for certain crimes.
The Youth Charging Reform Act (Senate Bill 323/House Bill 409) would do away with automatically charging 14- and 15-year-olds as adults. Those cases would instead start in juvenile court.
For older teenagers, 16- and 17-year-olds, the types of crimes that would automatically land them in adult court would be restricted to the most serious categories — such as rape, murder or carjacking.
Opponents of the bill included Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, who referenced the recent case of a 16-year-old facing charges for a shooting inside Wootton High School on Monday that left one student wounded.
“I will say this is a tough week in Montgomery County,” McCarthy told lawmakers. “We had our second school shooting — a second school shooting where a student was shot in a school in Montgomery County with a ghost gun.”
McCarthy was referencing the 2022 shooting at Magruder High School where a student was shot with a so-called ghost gun in a boy’s bathroom similar to Monday’s incident in Rockville.
In the Wootton High School case, the 16-year-old will be charged as an adult with second-degree attempted murder.
Proponents of the bill say it would still allow for cases to be waived up to adult court, but would be a more just approach to crimes committed by teenagers.
But Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates told lawmakers that the flaws in the juvenile justice system in Maryland should be addressed before the current law is changed.
He made a dire prediction, telling the House Judiciary Committee members, “That if passed now, without addressing the countless levels of systemic deficiencies that currently exist within the juvenile system, (it) will lead to an explosion of violent crime committed by juveniles.”
James Dold, founder of Human Rights for Kids, told lawmakers that Maryland is an outlier when it comes to the number of crimes that bump a possible juvenile court case up to adult court automatically.
“Maryland is the only state — the only state in the country — that automatically charges misdemeanor handgun possession in adult court,” he said.
Rev. Marlon Tilghman, pastor of the Ames United Methodist Church in Bel Air, Maryland, told the panel, “These are children. Children should be treated like children. The moment we ‘adult-ify’ them in order to justify how they are incarcerated, we have done them an injustice.”
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