Fayetteville Observer
RALEIGH — North Carolina labels youths 16 or older as adults in the eyes of the law if they are involved in a crime other than prostitution.
State House Rep. Marilyn Avila, a Wake County Republican, announced legislation Tuesday that would raise the age in misdemeanor criminal matters to 18 over the next several years. Youths age 16 and 17 would still be treated as adults if they are accused of felonies.
North Carolina’s policy of treating teens as adults is wrong, Avila said, because it imposes a lifetime of consequences on people too immature to make adult decisions.
These young people are guilty of “primarily stupidity, because of the teen-age brain that’s just not ready for the thought process of cause-and-effect and rational thinking in the spur-of-the-moment,” Avila said. They often have trouble standing up to peer pressure and find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, she said.
Their criminal records impose roadblocks as they look for work, try to go to school and otherwise become productive in society long after they have matured, Avila and other bill supporters argue. This imposes long-term and avoidable costs on society, they say.
Democratic state Reps. Elmer Floyd, Rick Glazier and Marvin Lucas of Cumberland County have co-sponsored this bill. Republican state Rep. John Szoka of Cumberland County voted in favor of a similar bill in 2014.
That bill passed the House, but the state Senate refused to give it any consideration.
Avila’s new bill would phase in the change over a period of years. Misdemeanants age 16 or 17 would be handled by the juvenile justice system on their first offense, she said.
State Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said the Senate leadership has not decided whether it will consider this new bill.
“There are a lot of folks who have concerns about individuals who are 16, 17 years old, who commit crimes, as to whether or not that criminal activity is something that ought to remain on their records, ought to be something that future employers and individuals should know about,” Berger said.
Only one other state, New York, automatically classes 16- and 17-year-olds as adults when they are accused of crimes.
Eddie Caldwell of the N.C. Sheriff’s Association said his organization has concerns about the cost of expanding the juvenile justice system to accommodate 16- and 17-year-olds. The group has not taken a position on the underlying question of whether it is good or bad for society to treat those teens as adults, he said.
Prostitution is an exception to North Carolina’s policy of treating 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in criminal matters.
In 2013 the Republican-controlled legislature voted unanimously that a person younger than age 18 who is caught committing prostitution is immune from prosecution. Instead, that person is considered to be a minor and a crime victim, part of an effort to crack down on human trafficking.
Source: Bill would partly raise NC’s criminal age of majority to 18 from 16