Smith To Push Again For Bill To Ban Automatically Charging Youth As Adults For Some Crimes

By William J. Ford, Maryland Matters

November 14, 2025

Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) will try again to convince his legislative colleagues that automatically charging youth as adults for some offenses affects the youths both physically and emotionally.

If tugging at their heartstrings doesn’t work, he has the financial argument as backup: Doing away with the practice would save about $17 million a year, money that could be used for treatment.
“You’re not going to get services. You’re not going to get treatment. You’re going to miss school,” Smith said Thursday of youth, who can spend up to 180 days housed in adult jails while awaiting trial.

Smith said about 85% of those cases will be dismissed or sent back down to juvenile court, “so even from a technocratic efficiency piece, we’re just doing this the wrong way. If you apply that same logic to any other element of government or any other private enterprise, you say, ‘Fix it.’”

He was speaking as part of a panel Thursday at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. The conversation titled “National Roundtable on Prosecuting Youth as Adults – Policy, Research and Practice” focused on a simple message: stop prosecuting youth as adults.

That was the goal of a bill Smith introduced in the 2025 legislative session in Annapolis. That bill would have raised the age at which a youth would be tried as an adult from 14 to 16. It also would have made those 16 and younger eligible for juvenile court if charged with crimes that include first-degree assault, third-degree sex offense and certain offenses involving firearms.

Juvenile Justice Commission wants to stop automatically charging youth as adults

But critics at the time said there are some crimes, and some youths, who should be tried in the adult system. While prosecutors could petition to move some youth to adult court, that needlessly adds time to the process and endangers public safety by letting those youth start in the juvenile system, they said.

Neither Smith’s bill nor a companion House bill made it out of committee. But Smith said he is determined to try again in 2026.

Smith was on a panel with Georgetown law professor Kris Henning that was moderated by Marc Schindler, former assistant secretary and chief of staff with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS).

A second panel featured a couple of Georgetown University faculty members, David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform based in Oakland, California, and Kyla Woods, who chairs a juvenile justice advisory group in D.C.

More than 80 people were watching the forum online and the roughly three dozen in attendance were told “plenty” of data is available that shows violent crime is mostly committed by adults.
In August, the FBIs Criminal Justice Information Division reported that of violent crime offenses cleared by law enforcement agencies in 2024, 18.5% involved (those under age 18) while 81.5% of the cleared cases were committed by adults.

One statistic about racial disparity that opened a few eyes came from Henning, who’s also a child advocate and an attorney in D.C.

“Representing kids for 26 years, I’ve only represented four white kids, and we should all be appalled by that data,” she said. “We know that racial disparity of Black children are the ones who are being” prosecuted

In Maryland, a recent report from a workgroup of the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices said that youth spent 90 to 180 days in adult jails before being transferred to juvenile court in fiscal 2024. However, federal guidelines say youth must not be held in adult facilities for more than six hours “unless a court finds it is in the interest of justice based on a seven-factor test.”

Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, in a statement released Thursday morning, applauded the commission’s recommendation to automatically end the practice of charging children as adults, especially when at least 85% of those cases are dismissed or brought back in juvenile court.
“I commend the Commission for this evidence-based recommendation and urge the Maryland General Assembly to swiftly enact legislation ensuring all children are treated as children, with access to age-appropriate interventions that hold them accountable while providing opportunities for growth and change,” she said. “Every child deserves a chance at redemption, and our system should reflect that fundamental truth.”