This isn’t kids’ stuff state lawmakers are talking about.
State senators last week approved a controversial bill that rolls back almost 20 years of how Colorado metes out harsh punishments to juveniles who commit serious crimes and get caught.
The state Senate approved House Bill 1271 this week, which addresses when juveniles can be tried as adults. The measure now goes to Gov. John Hickenlooper for consideration.
He should sign it.
At issue is whether district attorneys across the state should continue to have almost unquestioned power to stick juveniles with felony charges in adult courts for committing crimes like robbery, assault and other assorted villainy.
Few would argue that a 17-year-old who ruthlessly tracks down a victim or murders an innocent person during a drive-by shooting should face the most dire of state consequences — other than capital punishment. But forcing a teenager into adult court who stupidly rode along with supposed buddies during a burglary binge is absolutely not what lawmakers intended when they gave increased authority and flexibility to district attorneys back in the early 1990s. State officials made the changes after a bevy of gruesome gang-related murder cases, some of which were happening right here in Aurora.
These changes are long overdue. The very need for this bill speaks to who we really are in Colorado, and how lawmakers were led astray back in 1993.
As a society, we understand that children, even in their teens, don’t have the same mental faculties as do adults, and that the court process must reflect that reality. To accommodate that, a system of juvenile justice has been maintained for decades.
Sen. Ted Harvey, a Republican who opposed the bill, summed up how difficult the debate on this issue has been in comments he made to the Associated Press in a story last week.
“This bill is probably the hardest bill any of us will be voting on in our tenure down here,” he said. “I’ve been here for 10 years, 11 years, and this is one that I have been back and forth on both sides of this bill.”
Almost everyone “gets it” that kids can’t get away with murder, just because they’re kids. At the same time, a system that too frequently treats the trespasses of children the same way it does adults only makes lifelong criminals out of serious childish mistakes.
It was wrong in the first place to try and bypass the system by giving so much deference to the opinions of district attorneys, and this bill rectifies that by ensuring a court oversees how children are treated who commit especially heinous crimes.
It would be preferable to give more flexibility to the courts in sentencing children convicted of murder and like crimes inside of juvenile courts. This measure — which requires courts to review DA decisions to move the worst juvenile cases to adult courts — is an acceptable compromise.
It’s easy to understand why older teens should be held more accountable for their actions, especially when their actions are murderous. But in the end, this debate has made it clear that the business of judging criminals must be pushed back into the hands of judges and courts, not prosecutors, and HB 1271 is a good step in that direction.