I was listening to an episode of the Dollop podcast where they brought up racism in American jail sentencing and made the weird claim that “No white juvenile offender who was tried as an adult has ever been sentenced to life in prison, but many black children have”.
Does anyone know if this is true or not? And I’m not talking about discrepancy in sentencing, I’m curious if white children in general have never ever been given either life in prison or the death penalty.
Daniel Ash, sentenced to life in prison for a murder committed at age 17
False, here’s one right here, I would guess there are some others.
The OP’s quoted statement is not true, although there are stark differences in sentencing depending on race.
cite.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Sellers
This white killer was executed as an adult for murders he committed as a juvenile.
The Dollop guys are funny, but they’re not really the best source of facts. Dave Anthony’s research tends to be limited to one or two main sources, and both he and Gareth tend to blurt out hazily remembered factoids as truth.
Curious that California is the standout.
Several of the youths in Lost For Life were white.
Do you remember the Pam Smart case from 1990 when a teacher got her student to kill her husband? The killer, a white 16-year-old boy, wasn’t the only juvenile to get a life sentence in that case.
They have a three strikes law to cover state level crimes. Some juvenile crimes count as strikes. It was dialed back some in 2012 but the cite is even older.
Pshaw. As someone who watches the show “Deadly Women”, which includes features on underaged teenage girl killers, I can vouch that this claim is dog’s bollocks.
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In the interests of avoiding confusion and potential embarrassment, it should be pointed out that in UK slang ‘bollocks’ is a term of disapproval, but ‘the dog’s bollocks’ is one of very strong approval.
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I notice a lot of examples in this thread, but were they tried as juveniles? Juvenile has a different meaning in the legal system–it doesn’t just mean underage.
My impression was that those tried as juveniles don’t get life sentences. My question would then be if there were any non-white people tried as juveniles who got life sentences.
I’m sure someone will come along with an actual cite, but my understanding of the system is that juveniles that are tried as juveniles have their crimes generally forgotten when they reach adulthood, and are released from the system when they reach adulthood. The only juveniles that get a life sentence are tried as adults. So, no one who is tried as a juvenile is getting a life sentence.