Arrested at 16 or 17 in New York: Raise the Age, the Youth Part, and Family Court

Under Raise the Age, most cases against 16- and 17-year-olds no longer start in adult court. A misdemeanor arrest (a less serious crime) goes to probation intake, the office that decides whether a case can be settled without a court hearing. The state says that outside New York City, 70 percent of arrests of 16- and 17-year-olds are for misdemeanors.

A felony (a more serious crime) is different. A 16- or 17-year-old charged with a felony is called an adolescent offender, or AO. The case is heard in the Youth Part, a special section of criminal court. If the judge orders detention before trial, an AO is held in a specialized juvenile facility, not an adult jail.

The law presumes (starts from the idea) that an AO case should move to Family Court. For a non-violent felony, the district attorney has 30 days to prove 'extraordinary circumstances' to keep it in the Youth Part. For a violent felony, the judge asks three questions: was a gun or deadly weapon used, was it a sex crime, and was someone seriously hurt? If the answer to all three is no, and nothing else extraordinary is present, the case goes to Family Court.

In In re Gault (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a young person in juvenile court has the right to a lawyer, to fair notice of the charges, and to stay silent. The Court even pointed to New York's Family Court Act as a law that already gave minors a right to counsel.

New York adds its own rules. Raise the Age extended the state's parent-notification requirement, the rule that police tell a parent when a young person is arrested, to 16- and 17-year-olds. It also calls for special rooms for questioning arrested youth, like the ones already used for Family Court cases.

You can say calmly that you want to stay silent and that you want a lawyer and your parent. Then stop talking.

A case that moves to Family Court is handled like any other juvenile delinquency case there, not as an adult criminal case. That is the point of the removal rules above.

For people who do end up with a criminal conviction, Raise the Age created a way to seal the record, meaning close it off from public view. You can apply once you have stayed crime-free for 10 years. People convicted of two or more felonies, a sex offense, a violent felony, or certain other serious felonies cannot use it.

We could not confirm a statewide youth curfew in New York. Curfews here come from individual cities, towns, and villages, so check your own local code.