The 12 year old girls who tried to kill someone

Great Debates
1

What do you all think should be done with them?

The story.

Some say they should be tried as adults and sentenced accordingly which could be up to 20 years.

More of the story:
" Two 12-year-old girls have been charged as adults in the attempted murder of another 12-year-old girl whom prosecutors say was stabbed 19 times to please a mythological creature they learned about online.

The two girls, charged Monday with first-degree attempted homicide, face up to 60 years in prison if convicted in the savage Saturday morning attack in a Waukesha, Wis., park, according to prosecutors.

According to a criminal complaint, one of the two girls told a detective they were trying to become “proxies" of a mythological demon-like character called Slender Man, which they learned about on creepypasta.wikia.com, a website about horror stories and legends.

The slaughter of their friend, whom they baited after a sleepover, had been planned since at least December, one girl told a detective.

They said they invited the girl over Friday night and, after failing to kill her that night, lured her to a park in the morning where they played a game of hide-and-go-seek."

I’ve worked with quite a few children and yes, some can be downright evil and I’m not just talking mischievous nymphs. They have no compassion towards another childs well being and truly take pleasure in hurting others. We had this one, a stepchild of a relative like this. She would have this evil look in her eyes and she was so bad if it wasnt for the fact she was a relative she wouldnt have been allowed to be around our kids. We would not leave her alone around our children because she would do things like throw or hit others with dangerous objects. BTW, she seems fine now as a “normal” teenager and thru medication and therapy is more in control. However every now and then you can still see her former self in her eyes.

Now to the story, while I despise the crime, and thank God the girl lived, I cannot see putting them away like adults. OTOH I hate to think about what they could become in a few years.

What do you all think?

2

Children of that age do not have a mature view of responsibility- much of their thinking is what in an adult would be seen as mental impairment. Adult understanding of harm and death does not occur until much closer to formal adulthood at 18 or 21.

In the Bulger case in the UK the two boys charged with murdering a toddler were unaware of the permanence of their acts- asking repeatedly when would the victim come back to life (a bit like the mentally impaired man executed recently who left part of his last meal to eat later!)

Although tried in an adult court, the disposal was via youth justice and they served less than eight years and were released. In Scandinavia and many other European countries, all juvenile crime is dealt with by youth panels parallel to the criminal justice system which treat the offending as behaviour to be treated rather than punished. there is little sign of any major recidivism in jurisdictions which take this enlightened approach.

A society may be judged on how it treats its lowly.

3

I find this a little hard to believe, though. I’m not 12, but I remember being 12. I don’t remember a time when I thought death was temporary, or that luring a friend somewhere private and attempting to stab them to death was anything less than a murder attempt.

4

It is surprising how little we remember about our thought processes. However, when questioned, adolescents show evidence of poorly formed concepts that are required for full moral responsibility.

http://faculty.vassar.edu/abbaird/PreviousSite/juvJustice/steinberg.pdf

5

When I was 12, I didn’t have a concrete notion of death. It was an abstraction to me–the same way that a person can believe that a “trillion” exists but only in theory. If you’d asked me to explain what it means to be dead, I would have told you the right answer. But I don’t think “death” would have carried any special meaning with me on an emotiona level, having never grieved before, nor having been forced to think about it all that much. (I seem to recall feeling rather disconnected from the grief of my classmates when a student committed suicide in the sixth grade. I knew it was a big deal, but it didn’t feel that way to me.)

Which isn’t to say I think you’re wrong in your self-assessment or that I was a typical 12-year-old. But every kid is different. I can’t imagine how a kid who has never attended a funeral or grieved over a loved one will have the same understanding of death as a kid who has had these experiences. Nor can I see that their understanding can be possibly compared to an adult’s. An adult may still not have first-hand experience with death, but they know enough about the world that they should be able understand how important and fragile life is. A kid doesn’t, which is why they do dumb and dangerous stuff all the time.

6

Clearly we need to treat juveniles differently than adults, and the question is where we draw the line. That is, when is the adult thinking process fully formed. I’m not sure exactly when is, but I be VERY surprised if it was at 12 years.

I would suspect it would be something like this:

Children: Up to about age 10
Adolescents: age 10 - age 15 or 16
Adults: Age 15 or 16 and above

But I would be very hesitant to allow the death penalty for anyone who wasn’t legally an adult. I’m against the death penalty in all cases, but I would be even more strongly against killing someone who wasn’t legally an adult when the crime was committed.

7

International recommendations based on research suggest 12 as the break point for childhood and 18 for adolescence.

8

I have to agree. Heck, at 12 there were people that I actively thought about killing, but did not because I decided my freedom was more important to me.

9

The sad thing is that we have clear evidence from the western European experience that treating all child offending (in many countries up to 14) as a social rather than a criminal problem and using education and support rather than punishment leads to no increase in repeat offending. This implies that all imprisonment of children is to slake the anger of the population rather than a rational response (similar to an argument about Judicial Killing).

I suppose it all depends on whether we can encourage people to act rationally rather than emotionally.

10

So that is the development of responsibility. Did you feel the same way at 10, 8, 6. The research suggests not.

11

More or less, before the age of 10 my obstacle in the desire to get rid of certain individuals I hated was the in ability to figure out a cohesive plan to kill someone stronger than me. By 10 I knew enough about poisons, electrical shock, explosives, etc., to have been able to carry out a murder, but did not, because I couldn’t figure out how not to leave evidence that would indicate my guilt.

12

I would not treat a 6 year old the same way I’d treat a 12 year old. And I wouldn’t treat a 16 year old the same way I’d treat a 12 year old. Maybe we need more than just 3 categories.

13

Nitpick: A fictional character.Not a mythological one. I’m not sure there’s a difference between Chucky and Loki, but they seem conceptually different to me.

14

Besides rehabilitation and retribution (the two which you have mentioned), the criminal justice system has two other (and in my view more important) major functions:
Deterrence
Incapacitation

15

I always try to be willing to believe that my own experience may not be representative, or that my memories might be faulty. But this is a bit of a tough one. The closest I had come to human death at 12 was the death of a great-grandmother, and a classmate who was hit by a car over a summer. Both were a few years before I was 12, and I don’t remember any confusion at all about what being dead meant. I knew both of those people were gone forever; I don’t think I ever believed in an afterlife. I also remember crying at the realization that my parents would one day be dead. I was irritatingly precocious, though, and wasn’t fed childish stories about difficult topics.

I don’t think there’s any right answer here, but I think the least wrong is to leave this up to the psychiatrists.

I was going to say that goes without saying and expected it to be included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Iran does this occasionally, and there’s usually quite a fuss. What I didn’t realize until just now is that it was only in 2005 that the US formally abolished capital punishment for those who committed crimes while under 18, and around 70 convicts were spared as a result of that ruling. Interesting, if a little disturbing.

I wonder how much this also applies to adult offenders.

16

Which have been shown by the European example to be unnecessary in the matter of child offending.

17

Well most psychologists, sociologists and other experts lean toward the European model.

18

And previously many had been killed despite international pressure.

19

That is my onion with certain reservations.

20

:confused: