Maryland Dems Make the Wrong Move on Juvenile Crime

Maryland already has a problem with juvenile violence, and things could get even worse thanks to a “reform” bill signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore this week. 

Under the Youth Charging Reform Act, it’s going to become harder to charge juveniles as adults for certain violent offense, including those in which a gun is used. 

Speaking in support of the bill, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson said the state “was automatically charging kids as young as 14 as adults for cases that almost always—almost always in the super majority of cases—ended back into the juvenile court anyway but only months after being locked up in jail and many times in solitary confinement. Nearly a semester of high school is gone. For you and I, that might not seem like a long time, but for 14-year-old or a 15-year-old, that is a lifetime.”

Time enough to think about the consequences of their actions, maybe? Especially since once these cases were returned to juvenile court, the potential for any significant punishment dropped dramatically. 

Many top prosecutors, including Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, believe the charging reform is misguided. 

Bates, in his role as head of the state’s attorney’s association, told WJZ, “…The General Assembly chooses to ignore the data once again and pass legislation that will allow youth with guns who commit robberies and violent assaults to be given a free pass time after time when they are caught illegally carrying or using a firearm.”

Bates said prosecutors wanted the General Assembly to delay implementation of the reforms by three years to allow the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services to develop new programming to assist young offenders. 

“Instead, our request was ignored, and the members of the General Assembly vilified us for it,” Baltimore City’s top prosecutor wrote. 

Ivan Bates is hardly a MAGA conservative, but he does believe that committing crimes should come with consequences. Bates has advocated against policies that he believes leads to “mass incarceration,” but also reversed his predecessor’s policy of not prosecuting offenses like drug possession, prostitution, and trespassing. 

Bates was actually endorsed by Ferguson in his first campaign for state’s attorney, though the two are now at odds over how violent crime committed by juveniles should be addressed. 

Howard County State’s Attorney Rich Gibson is another opponent of the Youth Charging Reform Act, noting that even without the new restrictions on charging juveniles as adults young offenders are often getting away with more and more serious offenses. Gibson pointed to the case of Emmetson Zeah, who was 19 when he was convicted in the murders of two teens at a Maryland mall. 

“Our broader system failed him long before we arrived at this moment,” Gibson said. In the span of two years, this defendant had six separate contacts with the justice system. The majority occurred within the juvenile justice system, and yet none of those interventions altered the trajectory that he was on—nor did they accurately recognize the escalating warning signs that ultimately led us to where we are today.” 

Gibson also told reporters, “Let me be clear, prosecutors across the state have never opposed appropriate juvenile diversion or rehabilitative efforts. We support keeping more youthful offenders in the juvenile system, but only once that system is equipped with the resources, the staffing, the accountability measures, and the evidence-based programming necessary to address specific factors that drive that juvenile behavior.”

Maryland Democrats have no problem going after lawful adults who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Teens using guns to commit armed robberies, carjackings, or aggravated assaults? Not so much. 

The decline in crime that we’ve seen in Baltimore in the past couple of years has been outstanding, but the ruling party in Annapolis seems intent on undoing those efforts as quickly as possible… while making it ever more difficult to protect yourself from violent predators enabled by the legislature’s Democrat majorities. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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