Mod note: this thread starts with posts extracted from the mod and general discussion threads.



Not commenting on individual cases but trying children as adults is tantamount to child abuse imo. Not mitigated by legality

Depends on the crime such as serial killers who are minors or school shooters. Such cases in the grand scheme of things are mercifully rare but some crimes do warrant long sentences, even when unfortunately they involve kids.

Still, no excuse for trying them as adults. If crimes committed by children can warrant such sentences than dont hide it behind them being adults.

It's probably the only way to ensure a stiff sentence. They can't give them life without parole so this suffices.

I dont doubt it's a fudge. So much easier than trying to argue about how children should be treated - hey let's pretend they're an adult, that will do the trick.

How about we just stop coddling "children" and do away with the entire juvenile "justice system". A 12 year old who deliberately murdered someone is just as bad as a 20 year old who deliberately murdered someone. Maybe he could be easier to "rehabilitate", maybe not, but the rehabilitation of violent people should not even be a goal of the justice system, IMO. The main goal should be protection of the non-violent citizenry, with a side goal of deterrence.

Why don't we just do with all age-related protections, restrictions, and laws? Join the military at any age, drink at any age, vote at any age, have sex at any age, etc. No? Because people's mind's aren't developed enough until a certain age? Well, that's why we have a juvenile justice system.

I'm kinda a fan of coddling children

but at least your argument would be more honest than the 'trying children as adults' disgrace.

Really I would be fine with getting rid of those restrictions too, as long as it could be demonstrated that the child understood what he was doing.

If a child understands that killing people is wrong, he should be treated as an adult. If he didn't understand what he was doing, then his parents or guardians should be charged with a crime, and the punishment should include never again being responsible for children.

I'm also a fan of coddling children who have not killed / raped / deliberately seriously injured someone.

So am I

I seem to remember reading somewhere (but it was a long time ago so Im not sure) that an important aspect of the child v adult status was that one of the last parts of the brain to fully develop is that of impulse control (or some similar term). So it isnt always just about does a child simply recognize that killing someone is wrong, but is their brain developed enough to be able to stop themselves from acting out on that impulse.

Ideally I'm not in favour of it, kids aren't adults. Certain rare crimes/extraordinary circumstances however, call for ensuring the safety of society first, above all else, even if the convicted offender is a minor, unfortunately. I don't think there's any easy simple answers or solutions to such issues.

Judges are acutely aware of the fact that the female brain doesn't fully develop impulse control until around the age of 23, and the male brain until around 25, and usually take this into account when sentencing.

Well it's not used across the board it's again used for certain cases. I don't agree with some of the cases it's been used for to clarify, but for the worst of the worst crimes , I don;t see any other option and that's something I don't relish saying fwtw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Price_(murderer)

I'd be very interested in you and Chez's opinion on Craig Price, a serial killer who was tried as a juvenile, so could be only given six years, but was then given additional sentences for crimes committed behind bars. As a result he's been incarcerated since he was 15, for the past 35 years and it doesn't look like he's getting out anytime soon either, having landed another 25 year sentence in 2019.
Is it justified keeping someone incarcerated, since they were a kid? Yet he committed four (extremely brutal) murders, some of his victims being children, and numerous offences as an adult in prison. One of these crimes was criminal contempt of court for refusing psychiatric treatment which apparently was a condition of his original sentence. He was given 25 years for this offence which is pretty disproportionate and clearly designed to keep him in longer over the original murders, imo. Had he not have been given such a severe sentence for contempt of court, would he have committed more crimes behind bars? Do some of his crimes post incarceration have a sense of context, such as survival, prison society etc?
Basically, is this ethical? Or should society's safety come first?
This is what I mean when I say there's no easy answers here.

I read your Wikipedia link and am not sure how you arrived at "One of these crimes was criminal contempt of court for refusing psychiatric treatment which apparently was a condition of his original sentence. He was given 25 years for this offence"

Maybe I'm not reading well today????

Anyway, that dude should be in prison forever.

"Price committed his first murder at the age of 13 in Warwick, Rhode Island on the night of July 27, 1987,[6] Price broke into a home that was only two houses away from his own, [3] took a knife from the kitchen, and stabbed 27-year-old Rebecca Spencer 58 times, killing her.[3]

A little over two years later, Price was a 15-year-old freshman in high school when he murdered three other neighbors on September 1, 1989. Price, high on marijuana and LSD,[7] stabbed 39-year-old Joan Heaton 57 times, her 10-year-old daughter Jennifer, who witnessed Price stabbing her mother to death in the kitchen, 62 times, and crushed the skull of Heaton's 7-year-old daughter Melissa who also witnessed Price stabbing her mother and sister, and inflicted 30 stab wounds. The stabbings were so brutal that the handles broke off the knives he used, with the blades staying inside the bodies of the victims, including a knife blade lodged inside of the neck of the 10 year old girl, Jennifer.[6]"

That is not simply a lack of impulse control. That person should never ever be allowed to be in society. Ever.

No, you're reading fine, sorry. I was familiar with the case so mentioned the contempt of court sentence but I should have provided extra links, my bad. More on the contempt charge here and 15 years were actually suspended which I hadn't been aware of.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ri...t/1314976.html

Well, while not occurring in Price's case, other crimes of this nature is one of the reasons kids get tried as adults imo. Price's case was instrumental in new legislation by the state to try juveniles as adults.
He sounds pretty cold in his confession with zero remorse.


Another instrumental case was Willie Bosket, which I'm not sure how I feel about as the kid had a truly horrendous childhood marred by physical and sexual abuse. Yet he committed two murders, as a kid. I do feel to a degree he was failed by society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Bosket

This is the problem. Whenever you are trying to set a bright line rule, you can find extreme cases where the bright line rule seems crazy. It seems very unlikely that Craig Price can be safely returned to society.

The obvious solution is to have discretion to charge someone as an adult for crimes committed as a minor, but to exercise that discretion only rarely. That works in theory, but in practice, in some jurisdictions, you will end up with prosecutors charging a fifteen year old as an adult because he rode along on a robbery in which his buddy shot a store clerk.

It is a very difficult problem to solve. My general instinct is avoid trying juveniles as adults, but I can't honestly say that I think Craig Price should be allowed to go free.

When I was a criminal defense attorney, I worked mostly in adult court, but I did a stretch in juvenile court as a very young public defender. in my opinion / experience:

(1) The vast majority of juvenile charges belong in juvenile court. There were a lot of stupid kids doing stupid kid things, such as getting in fights in school or pulling on car handles in the middle of the night, that certainly don't warrant cases going to adult court. Most of them do not.

(2) Prosecutors send too many cases to adult court. In FL, a prosecutor can try a 16 year old as an adult for any felony (possession of >20 grams of weed is a felony). There are charges where a 14 year old can be tried as an adult, which are usually very serious charges, but there are some that are less serious (such as stealing a car) where a 14 year old can be sent to adult court and face adult consequences.

Cases being sent to adult court was usually treated as a game by prosecutors. It was generally used as a bargaining chip to dissuade a child from going to trial. "If you don't plead guilty today, I will direct file this to adult court and I won't have to deal with it anymore." It didn't just happen more often than you'd think, but it was most often the reason that a juvenile ended up in adult court.

(3) There are some cases where juveniles just need to be treated as an adult. This was not my case, but it happened near me. A 15 or 16 year old kid had his (very stupid) father buy him a gun. The kid and his friends then use the gun to go on a crime spree. They kill several people, including a random kid that was walking to a bus stop to go to his summer job. They drove by and just shot and killed him at random, for fun. You might say that it is "child abuse" to prosecute such a person as an adult, but there is some behavior that is so aberrant that we just cannot accept such people in our society and expect it to function.

Punishment for juveniles is very limited. In FL, you can put a kid on probation until they are 19, or you can commit (imprison) them until they are 21. No matter what the conviction was for at that point, they have to be released. If somebody is tried as a juvenile for a killing spree at the age of 17, they will be out in the street in a few years. People often talk about how juveniles should be rehabilitated and not imprisoned, but somebody that is capable of random thrill killings is not going to be rehabilitated in four years.

The criminal justice system is not only designed for rehabilitation, punishment, or retribution, but there is a public safety angle as well. There are some people that are just so dangerous that as a society, we have to compromise and realize that it may be awful to send a child to prison for 30 years, but the alternative is that we let the equivalent of a rabid dog out into the world. I personally think that the option of prosecuting juveniles as adults is exercised too often, and is often an unethical bargaining chip, but we also cannot just cast too wide a net and say that no juveniles should ever be tried as adults.

While we are at it, here is something I saw more than once. A 13 or 14 year old molests a child 12 or under. Years pass, they both grow to be adults. The victim speaks up about her experience. The molester is immediately charged with the most serious crimes you can imagine in adult court. I was flabbergasted when I saw this happen, and even more shocked when I saw there was very little consideration by anybody in the room that we were talking about a young child that had done such a thing.

That it's used to coerce is so unsuprising. I wonder which kids get coerced?

Have some provisions for extremely dangerous minors. Dont try them as adults because they are (or were) not adults.