Daily News

Child advocates speaking at a community forum here yesterday said they want to change state law so 16- and 17-year-olds won’t automatically be prosecuted as adults. Instead, advocates said, a judge should decide in each case if a teenager should be tried as an adult.

North Carolina is one of just three states in the U.S. that try teens who are 16 and 17 as adults when they are charged with a crime, advocates said. New York and Connecticut are the other two.

State law assumes that teens have the ability to think and reason as adults do, said Sorien Schmidt, the senior vice president of Action for Children North Carolina.

But at the forum here yesterday, Schmidt cited studies that show that teenagers lack the ability to make sound decisions by thinking through consequences and have difficulty controlling impulses-reasons, she said, that most at-risk and court-involved youth should be tried in the juvenile-court system. (more…)