I don’t know that you can slap an age on it and say ‘this is where we don’t cross into adult court.’ If all that’s really necessary for a murder conviction is ‘did you do it, despite knowing it was wrong, beyond a reasonable doubt?’*, then one could argue a six year old of average intelligence could be convicted of murder. If motivation is important to judge whether someone is mature enough for an adult-level guilty, then who’s to say ‘I didn’t like that she took daddy’s attention from me’ is any less valid of a reason than ‘She/he cheated on me’?
Is it possible that juvenile court is the insanity plea of the younger set? That when you have a case of a child that genuinely didn’t know what they were doing, or were suffering from a significant mental illness or abuse, that it’s easier to justify ‘only’ putting them away for a couple of years? But that when you come across a situation where there aren’t m/any mitigating factors, it’s not quite so easy to say 'Well, they are immature after all, maybe a year-long probation will be enough…"
There are some situations (I think this will be one of them) where the heinousness of the crime means that the juvenile system simply isn’t capable of handing out a sentence that fits; therefore the minor is tried as an adult so we don’t run into a situation where a ‘slap on the wrist’ is given. Theoretically, yes, a 15/16yo could get away with murder- if you consider ‘juvvie hall until you’re 18/21’ as getting away with something… but that 15/16yo had better have a damn good reason for their behavior.
Execution is obviously a ridiculous suggestion, regardless of how cold and calculated the murder was, but quite frankly there are some kids that are just wired incorrectly, and all the therapy in the world isn’t going to help them. We had a kid come through work several years ago who had killed a baby; no one (well, that is, no one who hadn’t read his full file) knew until the kid casually mentioned it one day. To hear this 10yo making an off-the-cuff remark about killing a baby was creepy as hell, and yikes was it a slap-in-the-face reminder about the kind of kids we treat. He was charged, but never ‘served’ any time for it (he was in the mental health system for other reasons), and if I was the parent of that baby I would be haunted by that fact forever. Think of how you might feel in this case, as the father of the slain woman. I could see how it would be easy to not want your daughter’s killer to be let out in a year or two, regardless of his age.
Going just by this case and the facts we have so far, I can also see how the prosecution might make a case for the boy being charged as an adult:
- The boy had his own, child-sized shotgun that was kept unsecured in his bedroom, and allegedly he enjoyed hunting and target shooting with his dad. One cannot, therefore, argue that he wouldn’t know what can/does happen when something is shot.
- One also cannot argue that he wasn’t considered responsible enough to handle a weapon- dad obviously thought the boy knew something of gun safety and responsibility, if he let the boy both own and keep** a shotgun in a household that appeared to include a 7 and 4 year old. And it doesn’t appear that the girlfriend had much of a problem with it, considering they were her 7 and 4 year olds.
- This was not a horrible accident, where the girlfriend was hanging clothes on a line while wearing white mittens during deer season, or stepped in the way of a plinking session. The boy (allegedly) went into the room where she was sleeping, put the gun to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. Then he went to school like nothing had happened.
- This doesn’t seem to be a situation of abuse or extreme mental illness. The police hadn’t been called out to the house every day to deal with domestic issues, the school hadn’t had a meeting to complain about the drawings the boy was doing of his future stepmother with a butcher knife in her head, and with the exception of fourth-party hearsay, there didn’t seem to be any indication that the problems in the home were severe enough to end like this.
- He knew what he did was wrong- when questioned, he lied and sent the police off chasing a false lead.
Laying the facts out thusly, and recognizing that we don’t have ALL the facts at this point, I could support a decision to try the boy as an adult. I don’t expect an 11yo to understand the subtle nuances of social behavior or what is/isn’t considered reckless behavior (take a look at any of the ‘What stupid things did you do as a kid’ threads for plenty of anecdotes to show kids are not good judges of what is/isn’t ‘safe’), but I damn sure expect an 11yo with this child’s history to know it’s probably not the best idea to put a shotgun against someone’s head and pull the trigger- there’s no way he couldn’t know what the result would be.
I wonder if they’ll charge him with the unborn baby’s death as well?
- This is obviously a gross exaggeration.
** I make a distinction between owning and keeping because it’s possible for a child to be given their own gun for hunting/target shooting, but not be allowed to keep it by themselves. For instance, my stepson was given a .22 rifle by his grandfather when he turned 10 as part of a familial rite of passage, but owing to stepson’s impulsivity and lack of maturity, Mr. Kitty was entirely responsible for cleaning and storing the gun, as well as the conditions under which stepson was given access to it.