What I’ve heard is that it isn’t that the US is opposed to the entire thing, but that there are some “childrens’ rights” items on it that people are worried could mean removal of the rights of parents to raise their children the way they want. E.g. kid claims “human rights!” and gets to override parental discipline etc.
If we were all judged as adults by the way we thought and behaved at age 12, I’d probably be in a mental institution. This is why there are laws treating kids differently. Because they are kids. Most kids grow up. A few don’t, and there are programs to deal with that, including prison if necessary.
There was a local incident a few years ago where some teen girls were threatened with a lifetime on the sex offender registry here for production and distribution of child pornography. What did they do? They emailed pictures of their chests to boys. Immature? Yeah. The way you deal with this is you get daddy to sit down with his daughter and kindly explain that boys, on average, tend to think in a certain way, that boys who just want to see your chest aren’t the kind you want, etc. etc., let’s go talk with mom, grandma, Aunt Suzie, etc. and hear about their own teen experiences.
But that is the logical extension of what you are saying.
OK, so not death but life without parole where that would be the equivalent adult sentence yes?
Absolutely no-one has said we should “let them off” A child of 12 sentenced to detention, supervisions and treatment until they are 18 will have spent a third of their life inside. That is not being “let off”.
Yes, they are sick, and they are children and they shouldn’t be in society unless they can be treated, but being children they can be treated. Or at least there is a greater chance of doing so.
I have no idea. Err on the side of caution, then. Make the onus be on the kid’s advocate to prove the kid is rehabilitated, using the best availabe evidence.
I don’t understand why you’re limiting the discussion to murder. Why not try a 12-year-old as an adult for, say, petty theft or creating a public nuisance? It’s just as logical.
What is so often missed in this discussion, and indeed is largely being missed here, is that it is silly and illogical to base the “try them as adults” question on the severity of the crime. We do not treat children differently because of the severity of the crime, we treat them differently because of their age. Deciding to treat a 13-year-old as if they are an adult because the crime is serious makes exactly as much sense as treating a 35-year-old as a child because they committed a petty crime. The critical question is how you want to treat age groups, not the crime’s severity.
As to how to do that, of course there is no unambiguously clear answer. A five-year-old is not a 15-year-old is not a 25-year-old. In Canada the basic system is that if you’re younger than 12 you cannot be charged with a crime at all (the child could be involuntarily committed to an asylum, I guess, if the case merited it) from 12 to 17 the system is specifically set up for young offenders, and from 18 on it’s regular criminal stuff. I guess that system is as good as any; the cutoffs are arbitrary and if you want to argue the ages should be different or 13 should be treated differently from 17 you might be right. monstro’s idea of having a hard test for the capacity to make judgments based on something other than age is also a possibility. But what matters is AGE (be it chronological or mental), not the severity of the crime. Jumping over your established age criteria because the crime looks really awful on the Channel 8 News is, to be honest, really stupid.
It’s going to be a stretch to show that a 12 year old is competent to stand trial, let alone legally culpable of attempted murder.
The Supreme’s, thank God, are taking their cues from science, not society, when it comes to juvenile justice. A little lightreading on the subject.
There are a lot of really, really good reasons not to try children as adults, and more specifically, not to punish them like adults. Those reasons are well born out by science, as well as recidivism statistics and public safety.
No, it’s not. These are crimes that can be committed due to not thinking things through - the reason a child steals something or creates a public nuisance is generally not the same reason it’s a crime. A child might want an item and not think about the person they’re hurting by taking it. A child might want to play a game and not think about the fact that the gun they picked up really can hurt people until it’s too late. A child cannot lure someone into an ambush, try to stab them to death, and continue stabbing them over the victim’s cries without their reasons for doing it and the reason their actions are a crime being one and the same.
So if there is a degree of planning and forethought in any theft then it is an adult crime? Let’s say the child take a knife from home, threatens another child and steals their money…adult crime? Waits until a driver goes to pay for gas leaving the keys in the car…adult crime?
So you seem to be saying that any time a crime can be shown to be a result of clear thought on the child’s part then they should be tried as an adult.
Suppose a seventeen year old commits a murder, is convicted to an indeterminate sentence at a juvenile facility, and at the end of that time, his advocate cannot show that he is rehabilitated. Do we release him, or not?
Good point. It’s not like we can wave a “rehabilit-o-meter” over someone to take a quantitative measurement of a person’s rehabilitation. I was reading an article a while back about how some adult prisoners have a difficult time qualifying for parole due to the the use of quantitative eligibility criteria that only take into account a small number of data points. If a prisoner has become substantially rehabilitated through religion, meditation, private study, making friends, developing a stronger bond with their siblings, etc., but they didn’t take enough behavior modification classes or attend enough formal therapy sessions, they end up with few or no rehabilitation points. I.e., “No classy no releasy”.
I have no problem saying that a murderous kid needs to be locked up for a very long time. Because a killer 12 year old, especially one that commits a pre-meditated murder, is fucking scary, and people should not have to live next to such scary individuals if society can help it.
But you do not have to say that a 12-year-old is an adult to lock them away forever. You can simply say they’ve demonstrated enough depravity that there’s something incredibly fucked up about them and institutionalize them as you would any criminally insane individual.
We could say that if a child under the age of 13 commits a heinous crime, they have to serve at least 20 years in a mental institution, where every attempt to rehabilitate them can be made. If after 20 years they are still determined to be at high risk, fine. Don’t release them. Keep their crazy behinds there forever, if you must. But at least we can take a stab at fixing them.
Society benefits from this by keeping scary individuals out of the system. It also benefits by not capriciously treating children as adults to cater to the whims of societal bloodlust. Everyone was once a child. Most people have children. So we have a vested interest in making sure that society is consistent and logical in how it defines “adult”.
I wonder if there are any cases of a child being tried as an adult for one crime and as an adult for another within the same time period. Like, a week after a kid gets sentenced to juvie for shoplifting, they get charged for murder as an adult. Has this ever happened before? Would a lawyer point to the inconsistency?
I’d be in favour of such sentencing for adults, as well, for particularly henous crimes, rather than simply sentencing them to a certain term of years and then releasing them. It strikes me that protection of society is not well-served by releasing psycho murderers after years of incarceration with no clue as to whether they will re-offend.
But that, of course, is another debate. As is the debate over the fact that human maturity is a continuum, that a 17 year old is arguably not much different from an 18 year old. Why not use the example we have been given - a couple of 12 year old murderers? Methinks choosing a 17 year old (or a 17 year, 364 day old), as an example is an attempt at the fallacy of the beard.
I think sometimes the decision to try a minor as an adult is based on the potential sentence for a minor being so different to that for an adult, even for a crime where you can reasonably say that they knew what they did was wrong, and they could be a danger to society.
Teenagers don’t really, completely get why murder is wrong; their brains aren’t fully developed. But they can still know that murder is wrong to an extent. Their sentencs should take their age into account, not just say “you’re under this age - here’s your maximum (very low) sentence” and then “you’re over this age - here’s your maximum sentence, which is much higher than it would have been if you were under 18. Even if you’re actually only 19.”
In the UK, the killers of Jamie Bulger were tried as adults even though they were only ten when they committed the crime (their victim was two years old). They kidnapped their victim, after trying to kidnap another boy and failing, tortured him, murdered him, then put his body on train tracks.
One of the reasons they were tried as adults was because, under UK law, they couldn’t have been tried for murder as children, so the maximum sentence they could have got would have been seen as extremely lenient. They would have left young offenders’ institution within a couple of years or, at most, would have stayed in there till they were 18. And then their record would have been expunged, as if it never happened.
As it happens, they got much lighter sentences for their crime than any adult would ever have got (which is fair), and did spend some time in an adult jail before being released, and are treated - within the law - as released offenders rather than children who did something bad once.
There is still a lot of outrage about the crime and the tabloids periodically try to make people hunt out the killers. But trying them as adults was the right thing to do because trying them as children would have meant essentially no sentence at all.
I’m in favor of increased leniency for children in some circumstances - most, probably. But I’m uncomfortable with this as a blanket statement because I don’t think the science actually supports it. There is a world of difference between “a teenager’s brain has not fully matured” and “teenagers can’t really understand why murder is wrong.” The first statement is true and making policies based on it is a good idea. At 18 your capacity for planning and controlling impulses has not fully developed. The second statement is vague and not particularly scientific, and making policies based on that concept could take a horrifying turn. And our brains continue to develop past our teens, past our 20s and maybe into our 30s and 40s. Are we going to decide none of those people are fully responsible for their decisions either? That seems like a miscarriage of both science and justice.
Setting the appropriate age is a typical continuum problem.
Everyone accepts (at least, I assume everyone accepts) that a 4 year old cannot meaningfully commit the crime of “murder” because they lack the capacity to have requisite “guilty mind” that is an element of the offence - to use the Latin tags, it is possible for them to commit the killing (the actus reus) but not possible for them to have the guilty intention (the mens rea).
This is supportable both scientifically and culturally - an examination of the developing brain and behavioral studies would show a 4 year old simply lacks the capacity of an adult.
However, as you get into the teens, it gets, of necessity, a lot fuzzier. At some point the brain crosses over the line into more-or-less adulthood. When exactly, we cannot say, and I doubt science would help much in pinning it down with precision - no doubt it varies from individual to individual. Thus, for convenience, we choose an arbitrary number as the cut-off, sometimes with special rules dealing with the years close to the cut-off point when using an arbitrary number appears to create injustice: see, for example, age of consent (some juristictions have rules so that an 18 year old doesn’t get charged with an offence for dating a 17 year old). As a society, we have chosen 18 (or 17 or 21 or whatever) as the yardstick of average brain development that is “adult enough” to meaningfully make adult decisions - consent to sex, vote, have an adult concience. That’s a social decision, only kinda-sorta defensible on scientific grounds.
However, no matter how you slice it, it seems to me that a 12 year old falls on the “child” line. An 18 year old dating a 17 year old is one thing; an 18 year old dating a 12 year old is quite another. If a 12 year old cannot possibly be “adult” enough to meaningfully consent to sex, how could they be adult enough to meaningfully be held resposible for having an adult “guilty mind”?
I was going on the science I’ve read, but my search terms are too vague to come up with anything right now. I meant that, on average, teenagers are far less likely to fully comprehend that murder is wrong. It’s not just about planning and thinking about consequences, but about frontal lobe development.
But I didn’t mean that teenagers should, literally, get away with murder. That’s one of the problems with the current system - try them as an adult, they can go to prison for as long as an adult (sometimes even longer). But try them as a child and they can do what the fuck they like. And that does nobody any good.
It would be better to make the maximum sentences for serious crimes longer for minors, so that they can still be tried in juvenile court, but they still know that they could go to prison for a long time. Make it less of a cut-off between minor and not a minor, where if you and your friend commit the same crime and he is two days older than you your sentences could be vastly different. Make the temporary consequences part really fucking obvious for those whose brains can take that in but not the long term, deeper stuff.
What’s the way to deal with a juvenile who commits murder? If you accept the argument that he shouldn’t be held accountable for the act then I’m sticking with my original statement: you’re allowing him to commit murder. There seems to be no practical difference between allowing somebody to do something and not allowing somebody to do something but taking no notice of it when they do it.
A normal twelve-year-old understand that stabbing somebody is wrong. A normal thirty-year-old understands that as well. Obviously, there are children and adults who lack this understanding and stab other people. Pretty much by definition, anyone who intentionally commits murder lacks a complete sense of right and wrong. If you accept the argument that people who have an incomplete sense of right and wrong shouldn’t be held accountable for their crimes then you have to ask why any criminal should be held responsible regardless of whether he’s a child or an adult.
NOTE: Before anyone freaks out the following is merely suggested as a point for discussion. I have not thought through all the ramifications so I am not arguing for or against this. Figured it is something worth exploring.
Would it make sense to hold parents partially responsible in cases like these?
I get and understand that a child’s mind is not fully developed and their impulse control is low so cannot be held completely accountable for their actions.
That said the accounts I heard suggested these two girls planned the murder for weeks ahead of time. This was not a spur of the moment impulse, this was premeditated.
I can say with certainty that at the age of 12 I fully well knew not to stab someone and no matter how mad I got at someone I never considered murdering anyone (might wish they were dead but never occurred to me to make that happen).
It would seem to me the difference is in large part due to how the children are raised. Either that or the children are sociopaths in which case the parents should be aware of that and take steps to get them help and be sure to supervise more.
All that said not exactly sure how you would reasonably punish the parents. Doing so would harm the family and (perhaps) other children. On the flip side though it seems to be they bear some responsibility.
I do not know. Even if society deems them to have some responsibility there may be no way to reasonably punish them (I assume the stabbed girl’s parents could file a civil suit).
If I’m a mentally handicapped person with a mental and emotional age of a 12-year-old, am I treated any differently by the justice system than a normal adult?
If so, then I guess we would be consistent in treating a 12-year-old as an adult. We wouldn’t necessarily be right to do this, but at least we’d be consistent. But only if that 12-year-old has demonstrated the mental and emotional age of a normal 12 year old.
It doesn’t seem likely to me that you’d find very many normal 12 year olds who would just up and kill someone, though. A psychopathic 12-year-old is not a normal 12-year-old. They are mentally messed-up through no fault of their own and should be treated as such.