Children Prosecuted As Adults. How Young Is Too Young?

This whole age thing was always fucked up. So at 16 you're allowed to drive a car. Once you're 17 you can go and get yourself killed for your country (with parental consent). When you turn 18 you finally get to vote on who sends your sorry ass to war. Then you'll have to wait until you're 21 so you can finally have a beer.

And apparently you can be tried as an adult in a court of law when you're only 12 years old.

Sweet Jaysus.

 

The Slenderman stabbing was a statistically almost non-existent event, which is the reason we're talking about it. Twelve yr. old girls are NOT going around stabbing people. Almost all violent crime is committed by adult males. Juveniles don't have more rights in Family Court and don't necessarily get less time than an adult would.

 

I agree: I feel like there should be a cutoff age for adulthood. Say, at age 18 you are an adult: you can drive, join the service, drink, smoke, and be tried as an adult at 18. None of this strange staggered adulthood.

 

Sorry, but splitting hairs is important here.

The court is not deciding whether or not someone is "evil". They are still just establishing responsiblity for an action, and what punishment the action deserves. "deliberately premeditated malice aforethought" and "extreme indifference to the value of human life" are not the same as "evil" in the the eyes of the law.

They are specifying the intent behind the particular action for which someone is standing trial and attempting to quantify responsibility, level of premeditation and blame . What they are not doing is passing a yes/no judgement of someone's essential, immutable nature (evil/not evil). That is not the job of a law court.

You believe that there is such a thing as evil. I don't. I think it's clearly a theological concept that has no place in a court of law.

VERY RELEVANT BUT ALSO SEVERELY DULL SEMANTIC SECTION AHEAD.

The problem we seem to be having (or at least, that I was having with Morrow) is that there are two interpretations of the term "evil" a colloquial one which just means "as bad as possible" and a more technical one. Under the technical definition, "Evil" is an eternal, universal state, an essential nature (going back to original sin, Eve's sin etc. this is a kind of badness that has existed in humanity since the beginning of time). Anyone who is evil can never not be evil, it is central to their being (this is not the same as being unable to rehabilitate someone).

Under the colloquial definition, the term "evil" doesn't belong in a courtroom because the simple question of morality in relation to certain actions should have been figured out before the trial. As in, we wouldn't be having a trial if we hadn't already decided that murder was morally wrong. We can decide that the action has been performed in ways that make it morally worse than that same action performed in other ways (malice, premeditation etc.) but there are ways of expressing this in language that doesn't have a more loaded technical definition.

Under the technical defintion, the term "evil" doesn't belong in a courtroom because it is at best a theological/philosophical idea. It implies that people have an immutable nature that is eternal and unchanging. This is a theological debate that has raged for centuries, why would you muddy the case by bringing this kind of language into it? you might as well start talking about diminished responsibility on the grounds of demonic possession.

Never mind the fact that if evil exists, what the hell is a court of law supposed to do? it completely destroys the entire system. We can only prosecute people for a crime on the basis that they have made a choice to commit it, that they could have done something else. If people commit crimes because some of them are "evil" then they are acting in accordance with an essential nature given to them at inception. They have no choice. The entire criminal justice system collapses under the weight of determinism.

SECTION ENDS


But it sort of doesn't matter what either of us believes about it, because whatever side of the fence you happen to be sitting on, the fact that there is a debate at all on the issue precludes it from being a useful distinction in a courtroom.

You need to stick to the facts of the case, and leave out terminology that brings theological debate into it, otherwise the facts of the case would be lost.

 

That is your personal opinion of course. It is as much open to interpretation as the law itself.

I'm not talking theology here. I also corrected my first post to "there is such a thing as being evil".

To clarify this: there is no such thing as being "born bad", no second Y chromosome, no original sin.

There are, however, truly evil people among us. I'm guessing you do read the papers.

 

I totally agree, there are evil people!

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/evil

 

I think it really depends on the age of the kid, nature of crime committed & level of maturity etc.....I mean if a 10 year old commits a fairly minor offence I think they should be punished but not criminalised, if on the other hand it's a child of say 13/14 that commits a really serous yes, charges in that kind of situation could be appropriate.

 

17. We don't let children vote because they've shown maturity beyond their years. Or go to war because they seem pretty on the ball.

I don't think they should be tried as adults just because the brutality of the crime seemed adult.

From a legal point of view this may not strictly cover non US citizens.

 

Iode, can you give an example what should happen punishment wise to some of the children quoted here that have done crimes?

 

I watched the documentary yesterday. This didn't have anything to do with Slenderman. The girl who instigated the stabbing has early-onset schizophrenia and was psychotic at the time of the incident.

 

Splitting hairs is important because the correct and precise use of language in order to prevent confusion and multiple interpretations is central to the efficacy of law.

I went into long and boring detail about why the use of the term "evil" is inappropriate. I'm not going to bother to repeat it. Since you insist on using the term evil to mean "really bad" then I agree, there's some right wrong 'uns knocking about guvnor.

It's not language that your going to find used in legal textbooks though, for reasons I've outlined.

 

Jury says teen in Slenderman stabbing attack was mentally ill

 

old enough to do the crime is old enough to do the crime,
the problem of course is that prisons teach people to become carreer criminals,
by their conditions and examples and a lot of things,
and if a person is too young to understand what they're doing,
but then some people never learn to understand what they're doing,
no matter how long they've lived, we've got one of those,
some how 'elected' to be the figure head of the u.s.

2/3rds of people are wrong headed about what causes crime rates to increase,
what incentivises crime and what doesn't.

and its in the culture, and the kind of world the culture creates.
vengence is always wrong headed, that's the one thing, if anything, skinner was right about,
within the very narrow context he refused to recognize anything existed beyond.

so what DO you do, with a kid, whom its unsafe for everyone else to leave wandering around on the streets?
(but young enough that maybe they didn't mean to hurt anyone, or didn't entirely realize what hurting anyone is)

the only good answer i have is a culture that doesn't motivate crime,
and that is not a culture, that enshrines hatred and belligerance.

 

Occasionally I watch the TV show Killer Kids on cable and I agree with the prosecutors that most of these kids
should never get out of prison or they will kill again.


Hotwater

 

If you trace the history of murders committed by women in the united states, before women could vote or own property, unless they were minorities or lower-class, women were rarely punished even for the most serious crimes. It was only when women started to be granted rights that they were expected to be held equally accountable for criminal behavior.

 

While we are responsible for our actions, the parents of these kids should be held responsible too. No one is born a sociopath, it's something that develops in childhood usually due to an extremely dysfunctional environment. Of course there are people who are raised in crazy homes with crazy parents and turn out fine, but many don't turn out fine. The adults in these kids' lives failed them and now society pays the price.

 

I respect your opinion, I just disagree on one point.

Being a sociopath can be genetically linked
http://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/sociopath-genetics


Anissa Weier, who admitted to participating in the stabbing of a classmate to please the fictional character Slenderman will avoid prison after a jury determined that she was mentally ill at the time of the attack.

The defense attorney did her job perfectly in convincing the jury. Instead of being locked up for decades as an adult Anissa had motive to go for a mentally ill charge.

The prosecution didn't do their job in having a strong rebuttal case. It's not like the prosecution had to prove how, who, when ,where, and even why they stabbed her. They just had to build their case around a mental illness defence.

 

Anissa Weier didn't stab anyone. She was an indirect participant who couldn't have been charged at all if she hadn't talked to the police. The girl who did the stabbing has schizophrenia.

 

Anissa Weier admitted to participating in the stabbing

 

I was actually responding to the assumption that the defendants are sociopaths. I don't think there is necessarily any evidence to suggest this.