Outgoing District of Columbia Attorney General Linda Singer is creating a controversy on her way out the door by lobbying to prevent prosecutors from automatically sending teenagers to adult jail for violent crimes, The Examiner has learned.
Since she announced her resignation two weeks ago, Singer has said in private meetings that she has committed staff to pushing for a change in federal law that allows prosecutors to charge 16- and 17-year-olds as adults when they’re accused of serious crimes like homicide.
Children 15 and younger can be tried as adults, but prosecutors must obtain a judge’s order to do so. Most juvenile offenders can’t be held in custody past their 21st birthday, while those tried as adults can be sentenced to life in prison.
D.C.’s juvenile crime bedevils city leaders. On one side are those who say, like Singer, that the city ought to focus on rehabilitating young offenders.
“We’re prosecuting too many juveniles as adults. It doesn’t make sense,” said D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson, D-at large, chairman of the council’s Judiciary Committee. “Everything we know about juvenile behavior shows that juveniles aren’t treated best by the adult prison population.”
On the other side are those who say that some child crimes are so severe that the juvenile system can’tdeal with the offender appropriately.
“We believe the current statute strikes the right balance,” U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor told The Examiner. “We make no apologies for aggressively prosecuting those cases.”
Singer could not be reached for comment, and her spokeswoman denied that she was working to change the law. But top law enforcement sources told The Examiner that Singer met with Taylor, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and D.C. court official Paul Quander Jr. in recent days to tell them that she wanted to, as one source said, “get this done.”
D.C. General Counsel Peter Nickles, who will become acting attorney general next, said he was “reserving judgment” on the matter. But Nickles is an outspoken critic of what he calls “the lock ’em up” approach to juvenile justice.
Liz Ryan, executive director of the Campaign for Youth Justice, said the current policy makes matters worse. She cited a report released last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that youth who were transferred to the adult criminal justice system were 34 percent more likely to commit crimes than youth retained in the juvenile justice system.
But Kristopher Baumann, head of the police union, said D.C. laws are already making young criminals view current juvenile law with contempt.
“It’s not just about the criminal, it’s about the negative influence these people have on their neighborhoods,” Baumann said. “For kids to have a chance in those neighborhoods, we need to clean up the streets and put the criminals away for a long time.”
Youth crime stats
» Children were the killers in 22 percent of homicides between 2002 and 2005
» Up to 70 percent of arrested juveniles have prior records
» The number of children in D.C. Jail has nearly quadrupled, from 12 to 42, sincelast year
