Maryland Passes Legislation to Significantly Reduce Auto Transfer

A Decade in the making: Bills head to the governor's Desk

After more than ten years of hard-fought advocacy, Maryland's legislature passed significant legislation (SB0323/HB409) reducing the number of children automatically tried as adults. Until this change, Maryland automatically transferred youth charged with a wide range of offenses into the adult criminal court, a practice known to be dangerous and ineffective; over 75% of them were eventually transferred back to juvenile court, dismissed or found ‘not guilty.’ Aside from Alabama, Maryland was automatically sending more youth, per capita, into the adult system than any other state in country.

If signed by the Governor, the new law will meaningfully reduce the number of children subject to automatic transfer:

• Removes five heavily used charges from the list of offenses for which kids are automatically charged as adults reducing the number of youth auto charged by approximately 500 young people per year.

  
  

• Prohibits a child from being held in an adult correctional facility except for temporary detention during processing (sight and sound separated from adults).

  
  

• Youth charged with offenses removed by this bill from the auto charge list will have their cases originate in juvenile court where a judicial hearing will be required if a prosecutor wants to move their case to adult court.

The adult system harms children

Bills like this are so important because the adult system can cause such significant harm to young people. Youth held in adult facilities face dramatically elevated rates of physical and sexual assault. They have far higher rates of suicide than peers in juvenile facilities. They are denied the necessary educational programming, including special education services, to which they are legally entitled. Their mental and physical health needs go unmet in systems built for adults.

Long after court involvement, an adult criminal record follows a young person into job applications, housing forms, attempts to access higher education, military service, and even public housing. The collateral consequences are staggering. So too, research confirms, is the effect on public safety: adult system processing and incarceration actually increases recidivism among teens. The system designed to protect the public does the opposite when it treats children as adults.

A step in the right direction

The Maryland bill will remove roughly half of the children currently subject to auto transfer from the automatic pipeline. Instead, these youth will start their cases in juvenile court and prosecutors who believe a case warrants adult prosecution will need to bring it before a judge, bear the burden of proof, and make that argument in a hearing. 

In an ideal world, no child would be automatically charged as an adult and a judge would review the full circumstances of each child’s case. While this bill does not entirely end the use of automatic transfer in Maryland, it is an important first step.