Is Lowering the Age at Which Juveniles Can Be Transferred to Adult Criminal Court the Answer to Juvenile Crime? A State-by-State Assessment

The trend toward get tough policies concerning juveniles has swept through just about every state in the nation, affecting younger and younger minors. In Texas in 1997, not long after a tougher law was passed, a fourteen-year-old girl accused of murder became the youngest juvenile ever to stand trial as an adult in Tarrant County. Texas lowered the age from fifteen to fourteen in a 1995 revision of the state\u27s juvenile justice code. In Michigan, an eleven-year-old boy, Nathaniel Abraham, became one of the youngest persons in the United States to be tried for murder as an adult; he allegedly shot his victim while perched in a tree. Michigan changed the law in 1996, giving prosecutors the authority to charge any child under fourteen as an adult for certain serious crimes.\u2