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Adult Charges for Juvenile Crimes? It’s Legal in the State of Colorado

In the past month, lawmakers in the state of Colorado have vocalized concerns that too many youth are being charged as adults, and they are now trying to scale back the authority that prosecutors have in the state. Colorado prosecutors have always been able to charge juveniles as adults when they commit serious crimes because of a process called a “direct file”.

Colorado is one of merely fourteen states that allow “direct file”, a process in which the prosecutor has the sole power to determine whether a juvenile crime will be charged in adult or juvenile court. Direct file is not reviewable by a judge, and the prosecutor’s power under a “direct file” was expanded further in 1993 after a public outcry over Denver’s “Summer of Violence.” Initial approval was given by House lawmakers this week to a bill that would limit direct file to only the most serious offenses, a bill that prosecutors vehemently oppose. The supporters of this bill argue that the current law has cast too wide of a net for juveniles and they state that judges should be able to review prosecutor’s decisions to charge children as adults. Under the current legislation, children between the ages of 14 to 17 can be charged as adults for lesser felonies like burglaries and robberies, placing them in adult jails and prisons with longer sentences and lifelong felony records.

There have been approximately 1,800 direct-file cases in Colorado between 1999 and 2010, and approximately 85% of these cases involve middle and lower-class felonies. Only 5 percent actually involved first-degree murder cases. An investigation by Colorado Independent also revealed that a lopsided percentage of the young people tried as adults are ethnic minority groups. This number becomes even more disproportionate when you look at the low percentage of ethnic groups that are a part of Colorado’s population.

One of the major problems with the direct file process is that it consolidates all power in the government, giving prosecutors the right to choose the crime to charge, to choose the court to file it in and to choose the sentence that the child will be given. In one case, two seventeen year old boys were charged with first-degree murder even though the prosecutors said that only one boy was the shooter. However, the boy that did not actually commit the shooting was still convicted of criminally negligent homicide and accessory to murder, crimes for which he received a sentence of 15 years in prison. If he would have been charged as a juvenile, he would have served a shorter sentence in youth prison with access to more education programs.

Situations like this are a tragedy, and it is always important to seek help from a skilled Colorado Springs criminal lawyer when you have been charged with a crime as a juvenile. Studies have shown that when juveniles are tried as adults, they are much more likely to suffer a gap in their education that leads to depression and suicidal attempts.