California Crime Bill Would Allow Adults To Be Tried as Children

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously termed the individual states “laboratories of democracy.”

In this way, California’s kind of like if you let Bunsen and Beaker from “The Muppet Show” loose to do as they pleased in the nation’s most populous state.

Instead of Beaker bearing the brunt of the ill-conceived experiments, however, the 39 million residents are the ones who end up feeling the pain when it all blows up in their face.

Plastic straw bans? Guess where they started?

A law designed to turn independent contractors into full-time employees that ended in massive job losses for those in the gig economy? They’ve got that, too.

Oh, and then there are those restrictive building policies that have led to expensive housing and massive rates of homelessness.

Paper straws, unemployment and tent cities are all pretty bad.

The damage SB 889 may end up wreaking upon California could be just as awful.

The legislation is the brainchild of state Sen. Nancy Skinner, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
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She’s from Berkeley, so I’ll give you 0.5 guesses as to what party she belongs to. The particulars of the bill, introduced Jan. 24, can be summed up with a wait-you’re-kidding-she-didn’t-actually-propose-that-did-she headline:

SB 889 means criminal suspects under the age of 20 could be charged as juveniles.

“Under SB 889, prosecutors who wished to charge anyone aged 16 through 19 as an adult would need to file a motion in juvenile court,” the Mercury News reported.

“What happens next is a trial in front of a judge, who is presented with aggravating and mitigating factors, and determines whether to approve the...

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