New Report: Reforming ‘Raise the Age’ Legislation

NEW YORK, NY — Youth violence is rising at an alarming rate in New York—there’s been a near doubling of youth gun crime and gun victims under 18 have more than tripled. In a new report for the Manhattan Institute, W. Dyer Halpern, an attorney who previously served as a Chief in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, argues that New York State’s 2017 "Raise the Age” (RTA) legislation is an important obstacle to dealing with the scourge of youth violence. Since RTA’s implementation, 16- and 17-year-old offenders—even repeat, violent ones—are now virtually all transferred to family court, where the possibility of consequences is vanishingly small. 

As it currently stands, RTA has a host of issues. The conditions in which prosecutors can keep such cases in criminal court have become prohibitively narrow. Compounding the barriers to attaching consequences to youth violence, many judges now are not allowed to consider a defendant’s criminal history, even if it involves violent or gun crime. And, troublingly, RTA has largely obscured outcomes for family court cases, preventing victims from ever learning the fate of their cases. This concealment of case outcomes creates a larger problem, since policymakers and researchers attempting to measure RTA’s impact on society have no way to access relevant data.  

In order to fix the negative consequences of RTA, Halpern proposes the following steps: 

• Youth-part judges must be allowed to consider a defendant’s full history—including all Family Court records—when deciding whether to keep cases in the Adult Court system; 

• The legislature should refine the standards used in removal hearings in order to remove ambiguities and to account for real-world scenarios that commonly occur; 

• The courts or the executive branch must provide granular data on the results of RTA cases, from arrest to final disposition; 

• Victims must be given a central point of contact to find out what happened to the defendant in their case; similarly, there needs to be a central point of accountability for the entire system. 

Click here to view the full report.