NYPD’s 2022 crime statistics were grim—especially for New York youths who have increasingly become both the city’s criminals and its victims. By last year’s fourth quarter, one in 10 shooting victims were under 18. And while fewer than five percent of New Yorkers are 15 to 17 years old, according to those latest stats teens under 18 are responsible for roughly 15 to 20% of robberies and felonious thefts. Things are now so bad that the NYPD is expanding its in-school officers program following a string of recent shootings.
A significant obstacle to dealing with escalating youth crime is New York’s “Raise the Age” (RTA) law, which is coming up on its fifth anniversary.
Before RTA, teens accused of misdemeanors like simple assault were adjudicated in criminal court. Now they go to the far more lenient Family Court. And while teens accused of felonies such as serious assault, robbery and gun possession still have their cases initially heard in the “Youth Part” of criminal court, prosecutors have to fight to keep them there. Here’s why:
Prosecutors can keep these cases in criminal court by proving the defendant caused significant physical injury; displayed a firearm; or unlawfully engaged in sexual conduct. While these may seem reasonable standards, the actual thresholds for meeting them are vague and undefined.
Imagine a gang beats up old ladies outside a church, for instance. To charge adult defendants with this assault, it would be enough to say they “acted in concert” — worked together. But to achieve the same outcome for a 17-year-old, prosecutors must both meet RTA’s new “significant physical injury” standard, and they must prove which specific gang member caused which specific injury to which specific victim. The result: It becomes nearly impossible to tell which exact fist in a group assault caused the ultimate breaking of an old lady’s bone.
And so, despite the ferocity of the attack, the case will almost certainly go to Family Court, where many youths will never see a judge, all records will likely become sealed, and the battered old ladies can never even learn the fate of their attackers unless they go to court themselves.
How did the legislation land on this unworkable “significant physical injury” standard?
When the NY Senate and Assembly were crafting RTA, legislators couldn’t agree on whether to use “physical injury” or “serious physical injury” — even though both terms had already had legal definitions. Instead, “in order to get a bill done,” they intentionally opted for an ambiguous, dysfunctional term not officially defined in the penal law, namely “significant physical injury.”
When pressed by his colleagues on what “significant physical injury” actually meant — and whether it would cover, say, someone who passes out after being struck by a teen playing the “knockout game” — former Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol of Brooklyn was flagrantly evasive, saying that he would not “speculate,” and was content to “let the courts decide what we mean.” This is not the first time politicians have deferred the work of defining terms; it was done before in previous Workers Compensation Law cases, so the legislature somehow thought it made sense to do it again in the criminal laws.
But as we’ve seen, building vagueness into the system has simply created a free pass for violent youth, when prosecutors can’t meet a standard that doesn’t actually exist.
Besides the dysfunctional three “factors” test, there is one additional way to retain cases in the “Youth Part” of Criminal Court: prove that they meet an equally unattainable threshold of “extraordinary circumstances.” Diffident yet again, Assemblyman Lentol admitted that the extraordinary circumstances standard would be so hard to meet that it would “apply in only one out of 1,000 cases.” So once more, the standard in place rarely keeps 16- and 17-year-olds in criminal court and instead transfers them to Family Court.
What is so bad about all these youth cases ending in Family Court?
By law, Family Court judges are barred from considering public safety when dealing with adolescents. Conversely, under RTA, criminal court judges are barred from viewing defendants’ Family Court records when making future decisions about where to send a case. Thus, a criminal court judge deciding the outcome for a teen in the above-mentioned old lady assault case won’t be allowed to know if the accused had three other assault arrests and two gun-possession cases — even if the judge arraigned the defendant himself! And records of these outcomes are not available — either inside or outside the system — for policymakers to assess the guidelines’ impact.
Returned home again and again, 16- and 17-year-old offenders become emboldened to break more laws, undeterred by criminal consequences. As I detail in my recent report on the impact of RTA, youth gun violence has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled.
We all agree that poor kids from the Bronx must be treated as fairly as rich kids from Scarsdale, but the current system is a purposeful debacle. Which is why advocates who champion RTA are willfully — and heartlessly — ignoring the damage done to New York youth by removing consequences to criminality.
Until “Raise the Age” is amended, New York’s most vulnerable will be terrorized by an unworkable, opaque system that rewards the bad behavior of teens who will never, ever learn any better.
W. Dyer Halpern is a head of Delve Legal, a former Unit Chief at the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, and author of the recent Manhattan Institute report, Reforming “Raise the Age.”
https://nypost.com/2023/02/11/why-teenage-nyc-criminals-never-seem-to-see-jail-time/
