Omar Khadr was fifteen years old when, by his own admission, he killed a US Delta Force medic in firefight in Afghanistan. He also admitted to planting bombs targeting, among others, civilians (NB - AFAIK, the bombs were never detonated).
The details of his case can be found in this Wiki link about him.
Notwithstanding a prearranged, but secret, plea deal which will give him “only” eight (more) years behind bars, a US military jury today sentenced him to forty years imprisonment. By the way, his eight years in the Gitmo prison awaiting trial, do not count one iota towards fulfilling his prison term.
There are many reasons to be outraged by what’s happened to Khadr over the years. I will confine mine to the absolutely outrageous notion that a fifteen-year-old can not only bear criminal responsibility on par with an adult, but can be sentenced to a virtual lifetime of incarceration (48 years including pre-trial time in custody) for acts committed while he was a child by any definition - 15 years-old. The mind boggles that other minds could see fit to do this. His trial and sentence are even more unjustifiable and downright barbaric when one also recognizes that he was essentially brainwashed by his father and family to participate as he did. The kid never knew any other way to be. A double hit - the innocence of youth destroyed by an environment and upbringing that no child should have had to endure.
Forty years in prison for a child! I don’t care that there was a plea deal about to be effected providing for a shorter sentence. It is staggering to acknowledge that anyone, let alone twelve senior military personnel, could recommend such a brutal sentence for a misled child.
Seems to me that the US military started this shit pile against him and they’re so deep into it that they can’t back out no matter what. They just have to prove they’re right and that he’s a terrorist and not a child soldier no matter what the rest of the world thinks.
I was really surprised at the reaction of the widow of the man he’s accused of killing. You’d think she’d know that this is a travesty… a trumped up case against a 15 year old, but nope, she’s right there in the shit pile too, with her kids writing victim impact statements.
Right. And most child soldiers are given a blanket ‘pardon’ (or effectively that). And most soldiers aren’t charged with murder for doing what they’re there to do. And most courts would have considered that eight years in pretrial custody should, must, count for something - sixteen years, in fact, in Canadian courts.
Did I miss something? He murdered a US servicemember. He planted bombs to try and kill more. And he did these things happily and with full knowledge.
Sure, he was 15 at the time. But 15 is certainly old enough to know right from wrong, and working as an belligerent and lobbing a grenade and murdering a US servicemember is wrong.
Cry me a river. He wasn’t some kind of poor, innocent little child.
And that phrase “by his own admission” implies a faith long since suspect, so far as I am concerned. I would like to believe that Americans would not abuse a 15 yo boy into a false confession. I really would.
Well, he threw a grenade at a US servicemember who was storming the house he was in, after that house had been extensively bombed and strafed. Since he was an “unlawful combatant” apparently he had no right to defend himself and his action is classified as murder, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing most people think of when they think of murder.
When Alyssa Bustamante was fifteen years old, police say she strangled, stabbed, and cut the throat of her nine-year-old neighbor, killing Elizabeth Olten and burying her in a grave she had dug in advance. She is being tried as adult. If convicted, she’ll be subject to the same penalities as an adult. You also object?
Tylar Witt was fifteen when she was alleged to have killed her mother by drugging her with a narcotic, stabbing her in her sleep, and then burning her clothes to destory the evidence. Problems here?
How about the dozens of other fifteen year olds in the past quarter-century that have been tried as adults for various heinous crimes?
Thanks Bricker. Are you saying that those crimes you cited are directly comparable to Kahdr’s?
If you were Kahdr’s defense attorney, would you object at all if the prosecution brought up those crimes when decisions were being made about sentencing your client?
Would you like the chance to object to your own reasoning now?
I’m not sure if I entirely agree with you that throwing a grenade at soldiers that were shooting at you and trying to kill you is a “heinous crime” I guess he should have stayed still and let them shoot him like a nice little boy.
Bricker certainly doesn’t need me to speak for him, but the list looks like instances of fifteen-year-olds committing the sort of cold-hearted and calculated crimes that one normally expects only from adults, thereby justifying adult sentences in certain cases. He isn’t saying that the cases are comparable, just that being fifteen doesn’t omit the possibility of adult capacity for crime.