When Johnathan Brunson was an impressionable 14-year-old, police nabbed him for stealing a watch and CD player from the local mall in Wilson. The petty theft changed his life.
“I was glad I got caught because I probably would have kept doing this and gotten worse,” he said. “It really reminded me how important decisions are.”
In that way, Brunson, now 31, was lucky. Had he been two years older, he could have been charged as an adult and left with an indelible black mark on his record. Instead, he entered the juvenile justice system, where rehabilitation takes precedence over punishment.
North Carolina is one of only two states in the nation that treats those 16 and above as adults in the eyes of the courts. Teenagers as young as 13 can be tried as adults too, but only if a judge finds reason.
With advocates of justice reform renewing calls for change, under consideration in the General Assembly are two bills introduced by House Republicans that broach the issue of adulthood in remarkably different ways. One aims to bring 16- and 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanors into the juvenile system. The other would give prosecutors the power to try 15-year-olds accused of the most serious violent felonies as adults.
The contrasts underscore an intra-party rift over this long-running issue, with separate camps of Republicans embracing divergent ideological philosophies.
“Yes, it certainly can be a divisive issue within the same party,” Tamar Birckhead, an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote in an email.
“There are a range of views in both parties, and let’s not forget that the Democrats in the General Assembly failed to raise the age for decades, so they, too, have not been successful leaders on this critically important issue.”
State Rep. Marilyn Avila, a Wake County Republican championing the bill to raise the age for misdemeanor crimes, expressed high hopes for pushing the measure through the House but acknowledged it faced an uphill battle in the Senate. A previous version included low-level felonies that were later abandoned to make the bill more politically palatable.
“I’m happy to take small steps,” Avila said.
Supporters of such an overhaul have been buoyed by a growing body of research showing that teenagers are more short-sighted, prone to rash decision-making and susceptible to peer pressure. They also point to evidence that exposing youths to the more punitive adult system puts them at greater risk of leading lives of crime.
“We can either create taxpayers or tax burdens,” said Brandy Bynum, director of policy and outreach for the advocacy group Action for Children North Carolina.
Now a social worker and a graduate student, Brunson described his foray into juvenile justice in positive terms. After being caught for theft, he had to write an apology letter to his parents and meet one-on-one with the local police chief.
He walked away with a nagging sense of guilt, shame, and, now, relief.
“I’ve thought about where I would be if I couldn’t have gotten into college at all or get a job in social work,” he said. “What would I be doing right now?”
On the debate’s other side stand opponents like Speaker Pro Tem Paul Stam, also from Wake County, who called Avila’s bill “irrelevant because a 16- or 17-year-old charged with a misdemeanor is not going to get hard time anyway.”
Plus, he said, “juveniles courts are much more expensive.”
Indeed, one concerning point is whether the Division of Juvenile Justice, which saw its budget shrink 16 percent during the recession, has the capacity to absorb the 8,000 members of that cohort who are convicted in North Carolina of misdemeanors every year.
“If you don’t have adequate funding, you’re going to be sending thousands of cases into an already overwhelmed system without any place to go,” said Ben David, district attorney of New Hanover and Pender counties, and president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys. “And these are some of the most delicate matters to handle.”
The proposal also faces stiff opposition from the law enforcement lobby, which raises objection to coddling youth with a track record of lawbreaking. There are already mechanisms in place, such as teen court and expunction laws, to make sure good kids who make a mistake are not dogged by it, critics argue.
Stam and state Rep. John Faircloth, Republican from Guilford County, presented the bill to try 15-year-olds as adults on high-level felonies such as second-degree murder and first-degree rape as long as prosecutors show probable cause for the charges. The original version expanded to encompass offenders 13 and up, but it, too, was scaled back after stakeholder input.
Stam said the bill is grounded in the belief that the juvenile system is too lax to mete out commensurate punishment for such serious crimes.
According to a fiscal note, state juvenile courts adjudicated 10 cases involving 15-year-olds charged with those offenses, known as Class B1 and B2, in fiscal year 2012.
Birckhead, the law professor, said the measure would likely push more of those teenagers into the adult system by eliminating a judicial check on prosecutorial powers.
“It seems the impetus behind this is a lack of confidence in the good sense of our judiciary,” she said.
Brian Freskos: 343-2327
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