Joppatowne High School shooting brings new criticism to juvenile crime policy

The Joppatowne High School shooting that left one child dead has reignited debate over whether a law requiring that children in custody consult with an attorney before being interrogated hinders police investigations.

“The 16-year-old who committed this crime, he’s going to live his life, he’s being charged as an adult, he’s going to be going through the judicial process as an adult,” Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler said Monday in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. “He made a very adult decision, he should be allowed to make this decision to talk to the police, in my opinion.”

On Saturday, Jaylen Rushawn Prince, 16, of Edgewood was charged and arrested in the shooting death of 15-year-old Warren Curtis Grant during an altercation in a first-floor bathroom at Joppatowne High School on Friday.

Police are still searching for the weapon, with Gahler pointing to the Maryland Child Interrogation Protection Act as the reason for the missing firearm.

“I hope my frustration is clear that the legislature has handcuffed police,” he said at a news conference Friday. “There are families … and the parents of the shooter, who have a right to know why we stand here today why we all stand here today and why there’s a person who has been shot in one of our schools, and we are not allowed to ask the person who committed that act because of this crazy legislature we have in this state.”

The Child Interrogation Protection Act , passed in 2022, mandates that law enforcement immediately alert a child’s parent or guardian when they are taken into custody and provide minors with the opportunity to speak with an attorney who uses age-appropriate terms to explain their civil rights before they are interrogated.

If police willfully do not follow the parameters of the law, any statement made by the child in question would be inadmissible in court.

In a January opinion, Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, said the Child Interrogation Protection Act was constitutional.

There were several failed attempts — largely on the part of Republican lawmakers — to reform the policy during the 2024 legislative session.

Among the cohort of Maryland Republicans who have consistently opposed the law in the past, Del. Kathy Szeliga, a Baltimore County Republican who used to represent Joppatowne in the State House, said Gahler’s frustrations are warranted. Even though the suspect is in custody, the missing weapon “is extremely troubling,” Szeliga said.

“This is a very family friendly community — lots of kids around. You just would hate for this gun to fall into the hands of a child or a criminal,” Szeliga said. “This is a perfect example of bad policy having unintended consequences.”

Szeliga said she’s hoping law enforcement officials who have lobbied in the past to repeal the interrogation law will do so again during the annual 90-day session that will begin Jan. 8 in Annapolis.

The Child Interrogation Protection Act does not prohibit law enforcement from speaking with children during the fact-finding phase of an investigation — only if the child is taken into police custody.

An investigation by The Baltimore Sun last September found that, of 77 juvenile arrests made by Baltimore police in July 2023, only one child called the Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s 24/7 Youth Access to Counsel Hotline.

By legal precedent, minors do not have the ability to waive their right to a lawyer or their right to remain silent.

David Jaros, a law professor and faculty director of the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, said that the state law may make it more difficult for police to “persuade or inadvertently waive” constitutional rights, but nothing stops minors from talking to police after they speak with their attorney.

“All this requires is that the juvenile make an informed decision about invoking or waiving constitutional rights,” Jaros said. “Our system is built on the belief that we can have effective law enforcement and respect fundamental constitutional rights, and the right to remain silent is an essential part of the protections of the constitution.”

Gahler said he needed to consult with his detectives regarding the number of instances in which children waive or invoke their rights to remain silent, but offered that “there’s no attorney” who will tell their client to speak with the police, “and, in this instance, we have a gun that remains on the street.”

He also was unaware whether the child charged in last week’s shooting invoked his right to remain silent, because officers had “sufficient information” to charge him without interrogation.

“The big question in everyone’s mind — and I’m sure in the parents’ minds, the students who will be going back to school later this week — is where is the gun?” Gahler said. “We know we have the violator in custody, but we don’t want this weapon out there. It could be used in another crime. We searched for it. It could have been dropped. It could have been passed. But until we recover that, I won’t feel comfortable.”

State Senate Judiciary Committee Vice Chair Jeff Waldstreicher, a Montgomery County Democrat, said the law should be revisited to make sure it’s serving its proper purpose, but that there is a public safety exception in the law that allows police to interrogate children if they are seeking information to protect against a public safety threat.

“How do I know? Because I’m the one who authored the public safety exception and included it in the law,” he said Monday.

The public safety exception follows the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court case New York v. Quarles, which ruled that there is an exception to the requirement that officers issue Miranda Rights warnings to people suspected of crime in the interest of public safety.

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, a Democrat who has testified against the Child Interrogation Protection Act before the General Assembly, said the Supreme Court case is “fine and good” regarding constitutional standards, but Maryland’s Child Interrogation Protection Act “overrides constitutional rights because it’s more strict.”

He said he “would love” if Waldstreicher were able to incorporate a clearer public safety standard into a revised law, but, “at the moment, that’s not the way that’s being read.”

“The statute’s clear as a bell. The public defender says to the police, ‘Don’t talk to my client’ — that’s the end of it,” Shellenberger said. “Clearly, this case where a gun is in public missing is the most concerning example of what we’re worried about.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Sam Janesch contributed to this article.