D.C. criminal justice policies were again in the crosshairs Thursday, as the House Oversight Committee advanced legislation on a party-line vote that would take away judges’ options to issue more lenient sentences to young adults and restrict the D.C. Council’s ability to change sentencing laws.
The timing of the effort was highly curious to Democratic D.C. leaders: House Republicans pushed the legislation forward two days after the D.C. Council passed the Secure D.C. omnibus, a massive public safety package that would enhance punishment for certain crimes. The legislation ratchets up penalties for illegal gun possession, targets “organized retail theft” and adjusts the carjacking statute to enhance prosecution, among other things. But House Republicans argued Thursday that D.C. was not going far enough to respond to the rise in crime — especially carjackings — committed by juveniles or young adults and aimed to harden the District’s approach to sentencing them.
The legislation, the D.C. Criminal Reforms To Immediately Make Everyone Safer Act — a title Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said sounded like a magic trick — targets the District’s 1985 Youth Rehabilitation Act. The law allows judges to grant lighter sentences to young adults under 25 and set their convictions aside if they complete the sentence. The D.C. CRIMES Act would make age 18 the upper limit for eligibility. “This bill requires we treat adult criminals as adults,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the committee.
While D.C. leaders strongly opposed the bill, they expressed the gravest concern about a provision that would permanently prohibit the D.C. Council from passing any legislation that changed criminal sentencing laws — a drastic curtail of the council’s authority that Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) called “much more extreme.” “This provision is as poorly drafted as it is offensive,” she said.
In a letter to House Oversight leaders Thursday morning, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) expressed concern that the D.C. CRIMES Act would hamper implementation of Secure D.C. and prohibit future efforts like it by only allowing Congress to change D.C.’s criminal sentencing laws.
A system like that, Bowser and Mendelson said, “would result in delays in our ability to respond to crime trends with stronger criminal penalties. And given recent experience, these delays could be extensive — letting criminals off with lighter sentences while legislation sits in Congress.”
Austin Hacker, a spokesman for House Oversight Republicans, said Republicans had no intention of interfering with or blocking Secure D.C. But he acknowledged that Donalds’s bill would block the council from changing any future sentencing laws — whether to make them harsher or lighter. “The D.C. Council in particular has no good track history of being tough on crime,” Hacker said.
Secure D.C., which Bowser strongly supports, has to go through 60 days of congressional review before it can become law. Hacker doubted that the D.C. CRIMES Act could pass faster than that to become a problem for Secure D.C., because it would have to get a House vote, overcome the Senate filibuster and be signed by President Biden — all not very likely scenarios.
But one could forgive Washingtonians for having some congressional trust issues: When the 118th Congress began in January 2023, most observers were not expecting dozens of Democrats to join with Republicans to block back-to-back D.C. crime and policing bills in a matter of months. Comer touted that unprecedented feat during debate Thursday. “Let’s not pretend ourselves — the reason that [Secure D.C.] happened is because of the work of this committee,” he claimed.
The D.C. CRIMES Act was one of two federal bills targeting D.C. that Republicans on the committee advanced Thursday, fulfilling a recent promise by Comer to continue to look for ways to exercise Congress’s constitutional power over the District. He and the mayor had happier times last week, when the House passed his bill allowing D.C. to redevelop the RFK Stadium site, a major agenda item for Bowser.
The second bill seeks to repeal a new D.C. environmental rule that adopts California’s clean car emissions standards and aims to phase out gas vehicles in favor of electric vehicles by 2035. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) called the policy “out of touch.” “American families cannot afford an electric vehicle when they’re simply trying to make ends meet,” she said.
Raskin, meanwhile, called it a “pro-pollution, anti-democracy” bill. Bowser and Mendelson said it would set back D.C.’s efforts to reduce pollution and emissions linked to asthma, lung disease and cancer. They stressed that consumers who bought gas vehicles before 2035 would keep them and that electric vehicles are expected to be more prevalent and affordable by then.
Donalds’s crime legislation, which also requires a website devoted to juvenile crime stats beyond what D.C. already does, passed with an amendment from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) that restored more judicial discretion.
Mace’s amendment removed a provision that would have required judges to issue mandatory minimum sentences to young adults in cases where those applied. The amendment narrowly succeeded in a 20-19 vote: Mace was the only Republican to vote for it, with unanimous support from Democrats. Luna was the sole member to vote “present.”
Mace said the issue was personal for her, noting how she had witnessed the impact of a mandatory minimum sentence within her family.
“Mandatory minimums are a one-size-fits-all solution to a judicial system rife with nuance,” Mace said. “Circumstances matter, especially when sentencing children. We have to remember these are children we’re taking into account here. Every case is different.”
The Youth Rehabilitation Act applies both to young adults and to juveniles who are being tried as adults.
The law has gone through significant changes in recent years, particularly after a 2016 Washington Post investigation found violent offenders who were given leniency under the law were being rearrested. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), former chairman of the council’s judiciary committee, drove legislation in 2018 that removed those convicted of murder and sexual assault from eligibility. His bill also expanded eligibility for the Youth Rehabilitation Act from those aged 22 and under to 24.
But attitudes toward the law — at least in certain circles — have been hardening recently. A recall campaign targeting Allen over his handling of crime cites his push to increase the YRA age limit, among other grievances. And U.S. Attorney Matt Graves has expressed frustration to council members that, over prosecutors’ objections, judges don’t issue mandatory minimum sentences for young adult offenders who are benefiting from the law.
In 2022, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council published an analysis of the law after the council’s changes, finding YRA sentences were issued in about 13 percent of all cases sentenced from 2019 to 2020, amounting to just over 800 cases. Nearly half of those cases were misdemeanors, about a fifth were for weapons offenses such illegal gun possession, and 13 percent were violent offenses.
The analysis found that those who had their convictions set aside after completing the sentence were significantly more likely not to reoffend compared with those who didn’t get that benefit. The older eligible young adults, ages 22 to 24, were also significantly more likely than younger people to benefit from the YRA and not reoffend, the analysis found.
Pointing to that data, Allen said in a statement that Donalds’s legislation “would make us less safe” by increasing recidivism. And he described the effort to restrict the council’s ability to change sentencing laws — two days after it voted to increase criminal penalties for various crimes — as bizarre. “It makes no sense,” he said.
The fate of the D.C. CRIMES legislation is uncertain because, as Hacker noted, there is no sense of when it could get a House floor vote.
Unlike votes that blocked D.C. legislation last year, this stand-alone federal bill would be subject to the Senate filibuster, requiring support from 60 senators to advance. And while many Democrats joined calls with Republicans to be tougher on crimes such as carjacking in D.C. last year, they would probably be more cautious about restricting the council’s authority so drastically in a permanent change to the D.C. Home Rule Act, which created the city’s local government.
Along with two other Republicans, Donalds introduced legislation to completely abolish D.C.’s local government last year — a bill almost certain to go nowhere but that Norton has said illustrates the intensity of Republicans’ focus on D.C. affairs this Congress.
