House Judiciary reviews wide-ranging juvenile justice bill, sparks debate over domestic-violence and registration changes

Bismarck — The House Judiciary Committee opened a hearing on Senate Bill 2037 on March 12, as prosecutors, human-services officials and advocates debated revisions to how North Dakota treats juvenile delinquency, registration for sex-related offenses, domestic-violence enhancements, tobacco citations and certain collateral consequences.

The bill, drafted by a Commission on Juvenile Justice work group and presented to the committee by Derek Steiner, an assistant state’s attorney for Cass County, would put several new juvenile-specific rules into statute while leaving many adult-code sections intact. Steiner told lawmakers the bill would, among other changes, explicitly allow assessment of criminal responsibility for children age 10 and older and make offender-registration decisions for juveniles discretionary in many cases.

“We thought it would be better just to treat juveniles by charging out simple assault and leaving out that domestic-violence connotation, for anything other than being in a dating relationship,” Steiner told the committee, explaining the group’s effort to reduce what he called inappropriate application of adult enhancement provisions to sibling-on-sibling and parent-child incidents. He also described amendments intended to (1) preserve juvenile court jurisdiction for certain tobacco infractions and (2) add a “Romeo-and-Juliet” age-gap adjustment so consensual contacts between similarly aged minors are not automatically escalated to class-A felonies.

Why it matters: proponents described the bill as a targeted effort to reduce what they called unequal application of adult criminal statutes to children, to clarify collateral consequences for youth and to preserve confidentiality and…