Technically, we don’t have just one juvenile justice system. Each state has its own unique laws, but generally speaking every one of the juvenile justice systems are at least as interested in rehabilitation than incarceration.
In theory, that’s not particularly objectionable. If we have the chance to steer a young offender in the right direction we should do so. The problem is that even when confronted with juveniles who clearly need to spend some time behind bars, many states make it difficult or downright impossible to do so.
Which brings us to the case of a 17-year-old in New Mexico who, over the span of just a few months last year, was repeatedly caught illegally possessing guns and large amounts of narcotics. As Bernalillo County prosecutor Kristin Guin told KOB-TV, “If this was before federal court and he was an adult, the sentencing structure would put him away for the majority of his life.”
Instead, the teen walked away with just two years probation for his crimes.
Guin said that sentence is for three cases. The first came in July 2024 when Albuquerque police officers found guns, fentanyl, and $6,000 cash in the teen’s car.
Two months later, he sped away from a traffic stop.
“He was running lights, he was running signs, he was passing people on the shoulder, eventually ditching the vehicle to take off on foot,” Guin said.
In that car, police found more of the same. Nearly 6,000 fentanyl pills and ghost gun parts.
Three weeks later, Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Deputies finally caught up with him. But the teen didn’t go willingly. He sped away from police and ended up crashing into a deputy’s vehicle. He had guns and drugs in the car.
I could kind of understand probation if the teen was caught with a little bit of weed and a pistol, though even then he would face several years in federal prison if he was an adult. 6,000 pills isn’t a personal quantity of drugs, though. This teen was dealing while illegally possessing a gun, and even if he did well in a drug treatment program, that doesn’t address his underlying offense.
Should the teen have been sentenced to spend most of his life behind bars for possessing drugs and guns at the same time? I don’t think that would have been appropriate either. But the two years in juvenile detention that Guin was asking for sounds pretty reasonable to me, and would probably do more to rehabilitate the teen than simply returning him to the street with the impression that he can commit serious crimes without facing serious consequences.
New Mexico’s crime and drug overdose rates are both well above the national average, and while Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has made some noise about revamping the state’s juvenile justice program to make it easier impose tougher penalties on young lawbreakers, she’s expended far more political capital going after lawful gun owners through her efforts to ban almost all semi-automatic long guns, impose 14-day waiting periods on gun sales, and prohibit concealed carry throughout the entirety of the Albuquerque area by declaring a crime emergency.
In fact, I’m not aware of the governor making any comments at all about this outrageously soft sentence, even though its been reported in local media. Is Lujan Grisham woefully uninformed about what’s going on in her state, does she not really care all that much about juvenile offenders getting slaps on the wrist for serious violations of state law, or both? Whatever the reason, it’s telling that something like this won’t draw a reaction from the governor, but she believes that it should be a crime for someone to lawfully carry a firearm to protect their kids.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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