Regarding “Westchester judge moves teen carjacking suspect’s case to family court,” lohud.com, Aug. 10:
A 17-year-old approaches a woman at a Yonkers gas station, pulls a knife and forces his way into the driver’s seat of her car. She happens to be an off-duty New York State Police officer. She fires a single shot; he is wounded, and he still manages to drive the stolen vehicle before he’s caught blocks away. He’s charged with robbery in the first degree, a violent felony.
Under New York’s “Raise the Age” law, that is where the certainty ends. Once a case like this reaches court, the law presumes it belongs in Family Court unless prosecutors can convince a judge that “extraordinary circumstances” justify keeping it in the criminal system. For a violent felony, prosecutors get a three-part test: did the offender display a weapon, cause significant injury or commit a sex offense, but even meeting that test is no guarantee.
New York courts have spent the past year trying to define “extraordinary circumstances,” and defense attorneys now advise clients that Family Court is the default, not the exception.
We need to fix ‘Raise the age’
I lead the New York State Police Investigators Association, representing more than 1,200 investigators and senior investigators within the state police officers who work homicides, robberies and violent assaults across the state. We are not attacking the merits of “Raise the Age,” but bringing attention to a policy that creates an atmosphere where juveniles can commit serious crimes without concern for repercussions. Diverting a 16-year-old shoplifter away from a criminal record is good policy and NYSPIA isn’t challenging that. We’re asking Albany to confront what happens when the law’s presumption toward Family Court collides with genuinely violent conduct and the consequences of that.
In December 2022, a Yonkers teenager driving without a license slammed his car into the cruiser of Yonkers Police Sgt. Frank Gualdino, killing him. Under “Raise the Age,” the case was handled as a juvenile matter. The teen was sentenced to two years of probation and community service. Gualdino’s widow, Lisa, stood in court and told the defendant directly: “You can’t possibly understand how shattered we are. You stole our lives from all of us.”
A family lost a husband and father. The legal system offered a curfew.
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That case is not an outlier. It’s what the statute is designed to produce absent one of a narrow set of exceptions and it is why NYSPIA believes judges, not a rigid statutory formula, should have the final say when the facts of a case cross a clear line into violence.
NYSPIA isn’t calling for a repeal of “Raise the Age” and we’re not asking to send teenagers accused of low-level, nonviolent offenses into the adult system. The law’s intent, that a 16-year-old caught with marijuana or shoplifting doesn’t need a criminal record, remains sound. However, there needs to be consequences and accountability at all levels of offenses.
What we’re asking is to give judges real discretion in cases involving guns, serious injury or repeat violent conduct, instead of a presumption that tilts hard toward Family Court. Currently, prosecutors face an uphill battle against the structure of the law itself, not just the facts of the case.
Investigators see what happens after a young offender learns that a knife, a gun or a stolen car carries little or no real consequence before age 18. Some kids get the message and turn things around. Others learn a different lesson: that the system simply isn’t built to stop them, no matter how serious the conduct is, until the day they turn 18.
It’s not compassion. It’s a loophole
Now, back to the 17-year-old carjacker who, through his own attorney’s admission, has a pending gun possession charge in Family Court. If he commits another violent or serious crime after 18, it will be considered his first offense.
That inconsistency isn’t compassion; it’s a loophole and the people who pay for it are the victims, like Lisa Gualdino, who are told that community service and a curfew are what the law has to offer.
Albany doesn’t need to gut “Raise the Age” to fix this. It needs to give judges flexibility to keep the genuinely violent cases and repeat offenders in criminal court, where the facts warrant it. That’s a commonsense approach and well overdue.
Kurt Labuda is a senior investigator with the New York State Police and president of the New York State Police Investigators Association, representing more than 1,200 investigators statewide.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY’s ‘Raise the Age’ needs a safety valve. Now | Opinion
Reporting by Kurt Labuda, Special to the USA TODAY Network / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Kurt Labuda, Special to the USA TODAY Network | USA TODAY Network
