The 16-year-old boy pleaded with the judge through scratchy handwriting on a crinkled piece of notebook paper.
He wrote about crying every night in his cell, about missing his family and his school. He told her he wants to be a welder and if she gave him a chance, she’d never see him in court again.
“I promise you I am not a bad person,” the boy wrote in the letter sent this summer to Jefferson Circuit Judge Tracy Davis, which the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting reviewed in court records. “I was just hanging around the wrong people.”
The boy is one of 17 kids in Louisville who were facing criminal charges in adult circuit court as of mid-September.
All but two of them are Black boys.
State lawmakers passed a controversial law last year to automatically send juveniles to adult court if they’re charged with a class A, B or C felony using a gun. After the law passed, KyCIR examined a decade of police data that showed Black kids would be most likely to face the higher level of prosecution.
Fourteen months after the law took effect, the disparity is starker than projected.
That’s not surprising to local lawmakers, child advocates and community leaders, who say Black children are often subjected to overpolicing, underinvestment and a perverse “adultification” by society that often leads to more severe punishment compared with their peers.
“This is what we do to Black people in this country. We want them to be, or assume them to be, older and therefore not worthy of the same treatment as other children in society,” said Lyndon Pryor, president of the Louisville Urban League. “This is problematic on just a number of levels.”
Pryor said saddling a child with a felony conviction injects them “into a system where they will effectively receive a life sentence.” A felony impedes a person’s ability to get a job, an education and housing, he said.
“This is how you punish people,” he said. “But if your goal is to actually make communities better, then we probably should be doing something different.”
The new law strips kids of the chance to receive probation or conditional release from incarceration upon their 18th birthday. Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney Gerina D. Whethers touted this element of the law during a press conference in August where she issued a stark warning to the city’s kids.
“You will not be eligible for probation like you might have been before, so don’t ask,” she said.
KyCIR obtained data from Whethers’s office that detail the young people prosecutors are pursuing in adult circuit court. In addition to the 17 children between 15 and 17 years old, Whethers is also charging 30 others who were juveniles when police and prosecutors accused them of committing a felony crime, but are now 18 or older. Of those, 24 are Black.
In Louisville, Black children make up about a quarter of the city’s youth population. Statewide, it’s even less — about 9%. But Black children accounted for 43% of the near 500 children that were prosecuted as adults across Kentucky in 2024.
Whethers, Louisville’s top prosecutor, did not agree to an interview for this report. Her spokesperson, Erran Huber, sent an email rejecting “any notion that the race of a defendant determines whether our office will prosecute or not prosecute that defendant.”
“Any idea that our prosecutors engage in racial profiling in the course of their work to help our community is not only false, but patently absurd,” he said.
Huber said prosecutors are aware “that certain demographic elements are present as it relates to juvenile defendants prosecuted for felony crimes.”
“Our hearts hurt with the rest of the city at this disparity,” he said.
But he said prosecutors don’t get to choose the cases that come to the office.
“They are brought to us only after extensive police investigation, and in the majority of instances, after they have undergone review by the Jefferson County Attorney’s office,” he said. “The driving factor of how we move forward with all of our cases is on the basis of what crimes have been alleged to be committed and what the evidence supporting those allegations says about whether felony charging is warranted. Not age. Not race.”
The state law that mandates the automatic transfer to circuit court for any juvenile at least 15 years of age who commits a class A, B or C felony using a gun makes clear that the Commonwealth's Attorney “may transfer the child back to District Court if the Commonwealth's attorney determines that it is in the best interest of the public and the child to do so.”
Huber said the same option is available for adult-aged defendants.
“Any simplistic framing of this discretion exercise as ‘deciding to try a juvenile as an adult or not’ would be, in our view, a mischaracterization of our process and does not fully capture the whole picture or appropriately reflect the true reality, nuance, or motivation in our discretion,” he said.
The Republican state legislators who pushed the law — known as Senate Bill 20 — in 2024 are Sen. Matthew Deneen from Elizabethtown and Sen. Greg Elkins from Winchester. Neither responded to requests for comment. In legislative meetings leading up to the bill’s passage, they hoped harsher punishments would deter youth crime.
“A lot of times, juveniles know they’re going to be treated as a juvenile in the court system, so they’re not as afraid to commit that crime or to pick up that gun,” Elkins said during a legislative meeting. “Hopefully, this bill will be a deterrent to that.”
Any effort to quell youth crime that’s narrowly focused on judicial punishment is destined to fail, said Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates.
“I think that unless and until elected leaders start looking at the problem of youth crime and violence in a much broader context, we're going to be playing catchup, and we're going to be doing one-off bills, such as Senate Bill 20,” he said.
Brooks said while the intent of SB 20 may not have been to discriminate, the resulting disproportionality cannot be ignored.
“No matter the intent of the folks who pushed SB 20, when you see those results, you got to do a second take,” he said.
If lawmakers fail to mitigate the conditions that cause young people to commit crimes, Brooks warns the cycle will perpetuate.
“We’re creating a farm system for future adult criminals,” he said.
But stemming that cycle and addressing the root cause of youth crime takes creativity and data-driven approaches that support entire families and their surrounding communities, Brooks said.
Nearly half of the young people being prosecuted as adults in Louisville live in the city’s predominantly Black West End, according to court records.
The West End is a product of racist redlining and today has higher poverty rates and lower homeownership than the rest of the city. The area is also inundated with vacant properties, predatory landlords, and the hollow-shell of industries long gone. Jobs are sparse in the area and accessing work is made difficult by a struggling public transit system. Finding fresh food isn’t easy, either, because the West End lacks enough grocery stores, leaving residents in a food desert. And the factories that churn along the river in southwest Louisville blanket the area in dangerous air pollution. Residents in west Louisville have an average life span about 15 years less than residents in the more affluent, whiter East End.
Louisville Metro Council Member Tammy Hawkins, a District 1 Democrat and majority caucus chair, said many kids caught up in violence are in “survival mode.” They struggle with unstable housing, hunger, utilities getting cut off, parents working long hours and a general lack of resources and opportunities, she said.
“Have we investigated these kids' livelihood?” she asked. “Have we investigated their household? Have we really got to the root of why they are doing these things? You don't just wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to go down the wrong road.’ Things happen in your life that puts you in survival mode.”
Despite their lack of surprise at the demographics of kids facing adult prosecution in Louisville, Hawkins, Brooks and Pryor all agree that young people who commit crime should be held accountable.
But they worry the current model isn’t working.
“I think that accountability is absolutely important and necessary,” Pryor said. “The question is whether or not accountability is productive.”
