🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
HIS ROBE FLYING OPEN BEHIND HIM, New York Supreme Court Judge Michael Corriero strides into his spare courtroom in downtown Manhattan. Packed in the spectator seats are about 30 of what the state has deemed some of the most violent 13-, 14- and 15-year-old offenders in New York City. They don't look it at the moment, dressed in their baggy jeans and accompanied by grim-faced mothers, grandparents and the occasional father. Other teens are shackled in handcuffs, and display the dazed look that comes from an uncertain ride in a sheriff's van. Corriero is here to dish out his own recipe of justice to these kids. He praises a kid who has kept his counseling appointments. ""I'm proud of you,'' he says. He corrects the English of another. ""It's not "I be sick.' It's "I am sick'.''
Corriero sounds like the prototypical juvenile judge, but he is an adult-criminal judge who sees about 160 of these kids a year. They are the juveniles who have been accused of major crimes like murder, robbery and assault. Under New York law, such cases must be handled by the adult judicial system. There the penalties can be longer and surer - and satisfy the public's desire for protection and punishment, not rehabilitation. In New York, Corriero can hand out life terms to kids convicted of murde r, and up to 10 years for first-degree robbery. But despite the severity of the charges, a majority of the juveniles who go through his courtroom wind up back on the street. He sends about 60 percent for counseling, and if they haven't been arrested agai n within one year, they're sentenced to five years of probation.
Corriero, 54, has been handling these juveniles for five years. Over the last few years, nearly every state in the nation has revised its laws to shift more youths into the adult criminal-justice system when charged with a violent crime. Even more sweeping changes lie ahead. Two weeks ago the House of Representatives passed a bill that offers states a $1.5 billion carrot to toughen their laws further, requiring, among other things, that teens as young as 15 be tried as adults and be eligible for l onger stays behind bars. ""We're not talking about a deterrent,'' says Rep. Mike McCollum, the Florida Republican who sponsored the House bill. ""It's incapacitation.'' Juvenile-justice experts denounce the bill as a fruitless attack on children.
In a strange way, Corriero personifies both sides in the debate over juvenile crime. In a city where the tabloids hunt down lenient judges, Corriero can be as tough as the next let-'em-hang judge. He's presided over a dozen or so trials where teens were convicted of murder, and he sentenced nearly all to life terms. Still, at heart he remains empathetic. He believes in rehabilitation. He thinks that some kids caught up in crime are ""good kids'' and that labeling kids ""superpredators'' is to dehu manize them. ""The problem with these kids in great measure is, nobody is paying attention to them,'' he says.
That kind of remark could have earned him a good slap to the head where he grew up - the tenement streets of Manhattan's Little Italy. The son of a seamstress and a laborer, he grew up poor and hung out with tough kids, which, he likes to say, puts him in the company of the kids who come before him. He recalls the movie ""A Bronx Tale,'' in which the good kid is saved from going on to a life of crime with his wayward friends. ""Simplistic, yes, but that's the kid we're looking for,'' he says. So i t was completely in character for him, after a dozen years on the bench, to lobby to take over the juvenile docket.
By far the most frequent charge he handles is robbery. Typically, a group of teens surround someone, brandish a box cutter and demand money. It's serious and terrifying to the victim, of course, but in Corriero's view, many of the kids involved don 't deserve to be sent to jail. Most come out at a young age, hardened criminals with felony records that will last a lifetime. ""That's pretty much an economic death sentence for many of these kids,'' he says.
How can he possibly identify the corrigibles from the intractables? He relies on standard criteria: a prior record, the severity of the crime, reports from probation officers. He typically uses a carrot-and-stick approach with the kids he thinks ar e salvageable. He defers sentencing for a year, during which the youth is often assigned to some type of counseling program. If the kid commits other crimes or skips his counseling, he could get sent to a youth facility and be stamped a felon. But if he stays clean, Corriero will likely give him the coveted five-year probation - and no felony.
Some days, Corriero is reluctant to pull the trigger. He recently listened to 15-year-old Sean, a robber, try to explain why he was cutting school and missing curfews. The judge sent him to Spofford, the city's juvenile-detention center. But when S ean appeared in court a few days later with his parents and agreed to obey the curfews, Corriero released him. It's that kind of decision making that sets off his severest critics. ""I always love it when judges say, "I'm going to take a chance on a kid' ,'' sniffs Peter Reinharz, who prosecutes children in the city's family-court system. ""It's the community that's taking a chance on the person the judge releases.'' You've got to figure, he adds, that by the time the kid's caught, he's already committed ""nine other'' crimes he's gotten away with. If anything, Reinharz argues, kid criminals aren't sent away long enough. A 14-year-old sentenced to life for murder could actually be released by the time he's 19 - just at the peak of his violence-prone yea rs.
It's always a gamble, Corriero concedes, but a judge is supposed to exercise discretion. The House bill and a state proposal would change that, severely limiting a judge's ability to give second chances. But until they pass, Corriero is determined to use his powers. On one recent morning he listened to 15-year-old Robert, a thief, plead that he wanted to go into the army and work with computers. Only he had never read a book. ""You should learn to read,'' Corriero said, before awarding him probati on. Robert smiled, and now the community will have to wait and see if the good judge made a wise decision.