The Anatomy of a Takedown: How Misinformation and Politics Undermined Juvenile Justice in Maryland

A Two-Part Series on Maryland’s Juvenile Justice System

The governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, tapped Vincent Shiraldi, to be the secretary of the department of juvenile services. He was tapped to fix a broken juvenile justice system. So broken, it needed the best of the best in juvenile justice who has tackled broken systems in the past with success. But the moral of this story is that it doesn’t matter how gifted and experience one may be at fixing problems if the political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to recognize functional policies and practices.

So dysfunctional that Vincent Schiraldi never stood a chance.

You may recall my June 6 article, “Maryland’s Juvenile Justice Blind Spot: Kids in Adult Jails, Solutions Ignored,” where I exposed how the state was housing youth as young as 14 in adult facilities while awaiting hearings. That piece peeled back the curtain on a system more interested in punishment than rehabilitation. Well—brace yourself. Because this story adds another jagged twist to that same Maryland mess.

Vinny, as many of us know him, didn’t arrive as a bureaucrat looking to coast. He came as a reformer with calloused hands—someone who’d dug into the toughest corners of juvenile justice across the country and helped build smarter, safer systems. But even the most experienced sailor can’t navigate a sea that’s been poisoned from the start.

It seems the moment Vinny let it be known that he would be reshaping the juvenile justice system including legislation to eliminate the automatic transfer of youth to adult court and return it to the old days when juvenile court judges decided on a case-by-case basis when a kid should be treated as an adult, local Baltimore news outlets began laying down a false narrative: that juvenile crime was exploding. Like a chorus repeating a single ominous note, every outlet—despite contrary data—began singing from the same fear-stained sheet music. Nightly broadcasts framed youth as ticking time bombs, feeding public anxiety with a steady diet of distortion.

But here’s the truth: the data never matched the drama. A report by The Sentencing Project, The Real Cost of Bad News, lays bare the mismatch between fear and fact. Between 2019 and 2024, youth arrests in Baltimore actually declined by nearly 50%. Month after month in 2024, juvenile arrests were lower than the year prior. (See graph below).

Yet you wouldn’t know that from turning on the television. What should have been a policy discussion turned into a public trial—and Schiraldi was cast as the villain. Research conducted by the Sentencing Project on all major news outlets in Baltimore found that “All media outlets highlight crimes by young people far more frequently than their actual contribution to overall crime rates.” The research also found that all new outlets, especially the television news outlets, overrepresented the coverage of juvenile crime by as much as 53 percent despite that juvenile crime made up only 5 percent of all crime. (See graph below)

Prosecutors, particularly Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, tossed accelerant onto the media fire. Bates publicly claimed juvenile arrests had risen 146%—a statistic so detached from reality it might as well have been pulled from a fortune cookie. How could Mr. Bates get the numbers so wrong? Did he retrieve the wrong data? Did he misinterpret the data? Or did he fudge the data to bolster the prosecutor’s demand of the governor to fire Shiraldi?

Regardless the reason why Mr. Bates got the numbers back assward, this false narrative had wings. It flew across headlines, social media, and legislative chambers, sinking truth before it had a chance to swim.

And make no mistake—this wasn’t just noise. It was strategy. With lawmakers watching the same headlines as their constituents, pressure mounted to “do something.” Reformers know this dance: one high-profile incident becomes the anvil used to crush an entire body of evidence. A public outcry fueled by fiction became the tool used to dismantle reform rooted in fact.

The ultimate target? A bill that would have returned discretion to judges to decide, case by case, whether a child belongs in adult court. It wasn’t sweeping or reckless. It was modest, humane, and backed by the Legislative Black Caucus, the Attorney General, two former chief judges, and national youth justice experts. It didn’t even call for ending transfers—just giving judges the ability to weigh the facts and decide.

But it never made it out of committee. The legislature slammed the door shut and bolted it from the inside.

Meanwhile, the media kept asking one question on loop: When will the Governor fire Schiraldi? It didn’t matter that Maryland was now violating federal law by housing youth in adult jails and losing $350,000 in grant funds. It didn’t matter that the vast majority of youth transferred to adult court were later sent back to juvenile court after months—sometimes a year—wasting away in detention. Facts were steamrolled by narrative.

In the end, Schiraldi resigned. The Governor claimed he ordered Vinny’s termination but that claim came after Shiraldi’s announced resignation, and immediately following that claim, and literally in the same sentence, the governor stated “we had been talking for a while,” which would corroborate Shiraldi’s assertion that he had notified the governor’s office that he would be resigning before the end of the year and that it could be “right away.”

This is what we can glean from these facts: the governor was under pressure to fire Schiraldi, pressure created by a false narrative, and Schiraldi knew it and told the governor’s office he would be resigning, and that it could be “right away,” and right away he did.

But make no mistake—Vinny didn’t fall. He was pushed. Not for failing, but for refusing to fail fast. Not for incompetence, but for inconvenient competence. He was a repairman asked to fix a sinking ship while the crew drilled more holes and blamed him for the water.

And yet, in his exit, the Governor admitted what we all knew: that Schiraldi made “real and meaningful improvements.” Just not fast enough. But reform is not instant coffee—it takes time to brew. And if we measure success in soundbites instead of substance, we’ll never drink anything but bitterness.

I leave you with this question: Could it be that Schiraldi’s leadership was fast enough for the governor, but the governor didn’t know it because of the false narrative that juvenile crime increased dramatically? What if the news outlets were sensationalizing that juvenile crime had declined? What if the headlines said that Shiraldi’s repairs are working? Schiraldi s life would have taken a different course in Maryland, and maybe, just maybe, his success thus far could have led to a change in how youths are treated — not as adults, but as who they really are — kids.

Let me be clear: this was not the collapse of an individual. It was the collapse of a political ecosystem built on a scaffolding of fear. Just like the “superpredator” myth of the 1990s, the false crime panic in Baltimore turned youth into monsters and truth into collateral damage.

In Part Two, I’ll explore what’s still broken—and how Maryland, and the rest of us, can begin to rebuild. But first we must understand: when media myths drive public policy, the victims aren’t just the children swept into the system. The victim is justice itself.

Steven Teske is a retired judge having served in juvenile and superior court. He has testified before Congress on four occasions and numerous state legislatures on law and policy reform. He was an adjunct law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, GA and is currently an adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ teaching criminal justice and business law.