A state juvenile justice commission is recommending the end of automatically charging youths as adults in Maryland, but state leaders are not on the same page about the best path forward.

The Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices released a 9-page report last month, supporting the replacement of automatic charging with a system where all cases begin in juvenile court and judges are given discretion to waive youth into adult court when warranted.

Currently, children aged 14 and older in Maryland can be charged as adults for first-degree murder and rape charges – at 16 or older, the list of quantifiable crimes for automatic charging expands to 33.

The commission argues the automatic charging law exposes youth to harmful conditions and places Maryland at continued legal and financial risk, mainly stemming from noncompliance with federal standards.

In fiscal year 2023, Maryland’s detention rate was 93.26 per 100,000 children, over six times the federal standard. That number rose to 119.59 in fiscal year 2024, a 27% increase.

The commission says Maryland reported roughly 1,600 violations – more than any other state – prompting the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to exclude Maryland’s data from national averages due to its extreme outlier status.

Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue is in strong support of ending automatic charging, arguing 85 percent of the cases end up dismissed or back in juvenile court regardless.

“Our position is, let's just start it in juvenile court. At least for that period of time, the child will be getting services, the child will be going to school and it doesn't take away the state's right to have that case heard in adult court, if that is appropriate,” Dartigue said.

But State’s Attorney for Baltimore City Ivan Bates says that data doesn’t line up on his end.

“Our data totally says something 1,000 percent different,” Bates said, “In ‘24, it was 76 percent of those kid cases, and in ‘25, it's 66 percent of the cases – that's just Baltimore City. When I talk to the other prosecutors around the state, their data is even ‘better,’ than mine, in terms of number of cases that are going down, being in the juvenile courts.”

The 85 percent figure came from February 2025 legislative testimony from the Sentencing Project.

Bates says “in a perfect world,” it would make sense to end automatic charging, but his concerns lie within Maryland’s justice system as a whole, arguing the current juvenile justice system does not have the resources to handle more intake.

“You're trying to push more in a system that's already broken, overburdened and you only want it to do more. So these kids are [now getting an] average 60-days worth of services. That's not enough for these kids,” Bates said. “I'm not saying that this isn't something that could maybe happen in the future, but the system, the way that it is built right now, can't handle that.”

But Dartigue argues the case timing for children charged as adults is worse.

“The timeline is stricter from the time the case is initiated under the juvenile court rules. You have approximately 30 to 60 days to bring that matter in for a hearing, whereas we see on the adult side, children are sitting for an average of 200 days. That is an extreme cost to taxpayers, especially for cases that end up either dismissed or sent back to a juvenile court,” she said.

Bates notes Maryland already went down a similar path in 2022 when the General Assembly passed the Juvenile Justice Reform law, which mandated that children younger than 13 may not be charged with a crime unless it is a violent offense.

Lawmakers changed that provision in 2024, codifying that children as young as 10 can be referred to the juvenile justice system for certain nonviolent crimes.

“It was such a terrific failure that the governor and everybody modified the law two years later. Are we going to go through that again, for listening to the public defender's office on this one? The issue is they're not prepared to handle the cases, we're not prepared to handle the cases and there are no programs for these kids,” Bates said.

State Sen. Will Smith (D-Montgomery County) is one of four lawmakers on the commission, and he says he plans to reintroduce legislation next year that would up the automatic charging age to 16 and reduce the number of quantifiable crimes to be charged as an adult.

“Nine out of the children charged as adults in Maryland are children of color. Eight out of those 10 are Black children. And so for a multitude of different reasons, we should be looking very carefully at what the recommendations from this commission were and move, I think, swiftly, to implement them through legislation this next legislative session,” he said.

Smith believes he will get a majority of the Democratic caucus in support of the legislation, and even some Republicans, and plans to make it one of his top priorities next legislative session