At what point in American history (or geography) has there ever been an absolute cut-off between kid and not-kid?
Here in Kansas, e.g., the age of consent is 16 and you can have an unrestricted driver’s license at 17, but you have to wait until 18 to marry, and 21 to drink or gamble. Which one, or which age, is the absolute cut-off?
Some (not all, but some) of these are also subject to exceptions and adjustments: your parents or a judge can grant permission to marry early, and you can have a restricted driving permit at 14 (“farm permit”).
I favor a similar sort of arrangement for criminal prosecution: the general rule is that under 18 = juvenile, 18+ = adult, but we can modify that if circumstances dictate. If the prosecution convinces the judge that you really should be treated as an adult for criminal justice purposes, is that different than you convincing a judge that you really should be treated as an adult for purposes of marriage or emancipation?
If someone is OK with sentencing a 15 year old to life in prison or capital punishment, would you be OK with the same sentence to a 10 year old? I know a lot of people thought that James Bulger’s killers deserved death, and they were only 10.
Apparently, the United States is so devoted to punishing minor children as adults that they have refused to sign the Convention on Rights of the Child.
Are you asking about a generic 10- or 15-year-old, or a specific one? Saying 15-year-old criminals generally should face life in prison is an entirely different matter than saying some specific person has shown that they are so dangerous that rehabilitation is unlikely to be possible and life without parole is justified.
For a ten-year-old, the evidence that rehabilitation won’t work is going to need to be much stronger to justify life imprisonment; the bar in fact should be so much higher that I’m not convinced it’s possible to make such a showing. I’m not convinced it is impossible either, because I do believe that some people are just born a wrong’un, and it is not utterly inconceivable that there are people who have demonstrated by the age of ten that we can’t do anything else with them.
No, actually, it’s mostly been because of right-wing paranoia about home-schooling and children’s rights. The Home School Legal Defense Association, e.g., once called the convention “the most dangerous attack on parents’ rights in the history of the United States,” and similar lines get trotted out every time the convention gets mentioned. For example, the guarantee of “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” is seen by strong conservatives as giving children the right to object to parental religious beliefs, and that of course is utterly antithetical to The American Way. [/sarcasm off] No GOP politician will touch this with a ten-foot pole, and the Dems have enough on their plates without bringing up another wedge issue.
“Should I have consensual sex at this point in time” is a more difficult and intimate question and therefore calls for more discernment (and a higher age threshold) than “should I rape and murder my neighbor”. The answer to the simple question is easy, No. Even a 15-year old should know that.
Yes, but is that the point ?
At 15, you don’t quite grok what “life in prison” means, or even “15 years in prison” means. At 15, you’ll be 15 forever and everything is both awesome and horribly frustrating. If one dispassionately considers the whole crime-and-punishment paradigm as a sort of contract between an individual and society, i.e. I get to do this one bad thing and in return I pay X to society in terms of fines, community service or jail time (which corporations do all the time, for example) ; then not fully understanding one side of the “contract” diminishes its validity.
Also at 15 you go plain nuts from all the weird chemistry going on inside you. And the impulse control part of your brain is still out of whack, which is why teenagers do all sorts of dumb, dangerous things. So that would be another item to consider.
You seem to be working from the assumption that an offender is sufficiently mature to be tried as an adult when he is able to understand that the act he commited was wrong. I do not think that is the point of juvenile justice. Kids know that murder is wrong at a very young age. Just as they know that theft, burglary or malicious destruction are wrong. The point of juvenile justice is that they are often less capable to act upon that knowledge and that as they mature that capability grows, hence there is a chance of reform.
If you follow the argument: “If he knew it was wrong, try him as an adult.”, you really do not need juvenile courts at all.
No, my point is that this particular agreement is utterly meaningless and little more than feel-good moral platitude.
Because such planned violence indicates severe sadism/psychopathy and thus they should not be allowed into society at large. I said “institutionalization” since their extremely young age may argue against imprisoning them (although it’d probably not be a loss to society to say euthanize them under the Groningen Protocol).
That is beside the point. The farmer is putting the sick animal down, because it endangers his other livestock. If he had a way of curing the animal, he would prefer to take it, because even the sick animal is valuable to him regardless of what it may have done.
Those who seek life imprisonment for this young murderer, are motivated differently. The outrage over the vileness of his crime causes them to seek punishment over rehabilitation. Is rehabilitation possible? I do not claim to know that. But as long as you are unwilling to even address the question in the first place and instead demand that life in prison must be a foregone conclusion, you cannot claim to be the good farmer.
At least one of the Bulger murderers later went on to other criminal offenses to do with possessing child porn. Pedophilia is not something you learn in prison. Almost as fucked up is that one of his adult female wardens at one of the facilities where he was held chose to enter into a sexual relationship with him well knowing that he was a baby killer.
In any case, a 15yo who abducts, rapes, tortures and murders a child is not acting out of poor impulse control due to being immature. He’s fucked up and needs to be put down like a sick animal. You aren’t comfortable with that and that’s perfectly fine. We should never be comfortable in the face of evil. Nevertheless responsible adult people should not be deterred by discomfort to make the necessary decisions.