Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Drawing the Line on Young Offenders
According to the Rocky Mountain News’ Bill Johnson, minors should never be charged as adults for their crimes. I’ve heard the argument before, and it is always framed with Johnson’s view that children, without the benefit of adult experience and insight, don’t understand right and wrong in the same way that adults do. Or, as Johnson puts it, “They [children] - and this is the bottom line - even in the most horrendous of incidents really do not truly know any better.”
His argument related directly to a local story about a 15 year old who took his father’s truck without permission, ran over a little girl on a tricycle, and drove off. The boy, Carlos Manzo, is being tried as an adult, which fact has roused Johnson’s defense of the wee ones.
The absolutely last thing I want to do is stick up for this 15-year-old knucklehead. What he allegedly did was horrendous.
Yet, after considering it a bit, I have concluded I must defend him for the lone reason so many people too quickly want to forget, the least among them being the Weld County district attorney:He is a 15-year-old boy.
A kid.
To be sure, he is a kid who may have killed somebody’s 9-year-old daughter, God rest her.
To be honest, I’m a bit sympathetic with the view. I have issues with minors--even the worst of the offenders--being in the general prison population. For that matter, I don’t believe that a 15 year old’s judgement is fully developed, neither is his outlook on the world truly adult in nature. That doesn’t mean, though, that the kid doesn’t know right from wrong, and doesn’t “truly know better.” That’s balderdash: while the boy may not have had a complete picture of the ultimate consequences, you can be utterly sure that he knew that it was wrong to take the truck, knew that driving recklessly was wrong, knew that leaving the scene of the (I hate to use this term) accident was wrong, and knew that all of these things flowed from his own decisions.
Being young doesn’t absolve a person of complete responsibility for their actions, and the closer that kid is to being an adult, the more adult they must be treated.
I can’t find it in me to judge whether this particular case called for Manzo to be tried as an adult, but I do trust that the DA gave every consideration to the age of the offender before making his decision. I trust that it wasn’t done lightly.
What truly galls me, though, is that Johnson seems to think that no minor should ever be charged as an adult; that every offense should be handled by the juvenile court. How about this case of a minor just one year older than Carlos Manzo?
A teenager was charged on Tuesday with killing and raping his sister and beating his niece with a sledgehammer in a crime the sheriff called one of the most brutal he’s ever seen.
Walter Smith Jr., 16, was charged with the first-degree murder and rape of his 22-year-old sister, Betsy Mary Smith, and aggravated assault against his two year-old niece, Andrea Costello.
Smith was charged after he recounted Monday morning’s events to Spotsylvania detectives, said Sheriff Howard Smith. Based on Walter Smith’s accounts, police said Betsy Smith was beaten with a sledgehammer and stabbed before being raped. When Costello began crying, she was struck in the head with a sledgehammer. Betsy Smith, Costello and a 1-year-old boy were then locked inside the room.
Does Johnson’s thought--"They [children] - and this is the bottom line - even in the most horrendous of incidents really do not truly know any better"--still apply? Do we look at Walter Smith and say, “He’s just a child, he didn’t understand what he was doing, and he shouldn’t face the full, adult consequences of his actions.”
I would hope not. I would hope that Smith won’t be incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility for a few years and then released because that’s what we do with young offenders (and, not knowing Virginia’s laws, I have no idea how they deal with these incidents). Whatever excuses can be drummed up for Smith, the fact is that he is a murderer and a rapist, a vicious criminal regardless of his age. I, like most people, believe in second chances, in redemption, and in the belief that people can (and often do) better themselves--right up to a point.
We all draw a line somewhere that says beyond this point a person can’t be saved. I have a pretty good idea where I’ve drawn that line, but I wonder where Johnson draws his. Are Smith’s crimes adult enough to warrant an adult response? Or can Johnson, in good conscience, say that Smith truly did not know any better?
Update: Kindly linked by Trench.
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My problem with prosecuting a 15-year-old for a vehicular crime like this is that vehicles are deceptively dangerous. When you start riding in a car before the age of one, it can be very difficult to wrap your head around the idea that a car has the potential to go from benign to hideously dangerous (to yourself or others) in under a second. And that sort of forethought is pretty much the antithesis of the way a 15-y.o. boy’s mind works.
Now, from the editorial we don’t know all the details, but for the usual sort of vehicular manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident, I’d say that nearly all such crimes should show rather more than the usual leniency towards young offenders. They’re usually caused by a combination of immaturity and bad luck, which I suspect all of us have exhibited more than once. But for the grace of sheer, dumb luck I could have killed people more than once when I was younger and dumber.
Note that none of this reasoning applies to intentional crimes of violence. I don’t have a problem with prosecuting technical minors as adults in many cases. For that matter, if the facts in this case are particularly egregious (intentional homicide, for instance), I could support such a charging decision here too.
I don’t disagree with that--it’s the blanket nature of Johnson’s idea that minors don’t know better and should never be treated as adults by the legal system that gets me. Like I said, I really don’t know if Manzo should be tried as an adult since I don’t know enough about the case to make that judgment for myself.
And my trust of the DA isn’t such that I think he’s above criticism or disagreement; that’s all fair game especially for a journalist like Johnson who writes opinion pieces like this for a living.
But there are very good times to try minors as adults and Johnson’s assertion to the contrary strikes me as worth disagreeing with.
I disagree with that blanket assertion, too. But, Mike Nifong.
You’d be surprised how many people agree with Mr. Johnson. There are entire web communities dedicated to the concept of how kids should never be tried as adults. That includes kids like Eric Hainstock who shot and killed his principal at point blank range and Eric Schorling who plunged a butcher knife into his girlfriend’s back in the middle of their high school.
But, Mike Nifong.
That thought was, very literally, in my head as I was originally typing this up this morning. And, yes, I think it’s a very fair point.
Well, Trench, I guess boys will be boys. Or something bland and stupid like that.
As I was writing that, I was thinking that it was a tiny little bit of poetic justice that the name of that scumbag can now be used as the entirety of an argument:
“The prosecution has argued that it would have dropped the case if it weren’t so strong. But, Mike Nifong.”
“The prosecution would have you believe that it has the best interests of the community at heart. But, Mike Nifong.”
Mike Nifong is the new Chewbacca!
Seriously, though, my problem with Bill Johnson’s position is that the child/adult delineation is completely arbitrary. Does a person change so dramatically on their 18th birthday that an entirely new set of laws should apply to them? Why 18? Why not 15 or 21? It’s so arbitrary that it’s ludicrous. The child/adult delineation must always be left to some level of interpretation.
Speak the truth, brother Jerry, speak the truth.
Jerry beat me to it. Is a child “incapable of making fully informed decisions about right and wrong” the day before his 18th birthday, yet somehow be magically fully informed the day after his 18th birthday? Sounds absurd, and that would be a good reason why prosecutors have the ability to try a juvenile as an adult.
His whole argument is described in the piece as “Did he ever think that by stealing his daddy’s keys he might end up killing someone? Of course he did not.” Well, thanks for clearing that up, Bill. It’s the “Of course he did not” defense. Brilliant! (Isn’t that some sort of internet law, any argument following the phrase “Of course”, “It goes without saying” or “Everybody knows” is most likely false?)
I’m remembering that defense for future reference. You never know when the “of course he did not” defense could save you from the big house.
"(Isn’t that some sort of internet law, any argument following the phrase “Of course”, “It goes without saying” or “Everybody knows” is most likely false?)”
Ummm… Dork, you do realize that I quite frequently use some variation of those phrase stubs in close proximity to the words “I can always be completely and totally wrong about this.” So does that mean that, whenever I use that sequence of words, I’m immediately considered most likely correct? If so, everyone should just stop arguing about everything and just listen to me all the time, as I most likely have the right answers to begin with. :D
Sorry for the double post. But this has caused me to do a good bit of thinking as to the nature of “being adult” in American society and how it has come to be. If I can do some deeper research and marshal my thoughts correctly over the next few days (Which is never a given on any specific topic, as we all know. I’ve been trying to write that damned post on immigration reform for the past 2 months now and still can’t get it right. Dammit. I blame WoW for my disjointed blogging efforts.), I will post it all before Monday is over.
I’ve been convinced for quite some time that there aren’t that many adults left in our country. But that’s a conversation best left for beer.
When is the last time you read a Bill Johnson column that wasn’t just jam packed with stupidity? I can’t recall one. He’s an extraordinarily bad writer and shallow thinker does not begin to do him justice. This was a typical whiny little vapid column for him.
Yeah, let’s just say that he isn’t my favorite writer. At all.
Beer?
I’m up for next Friday night. May I suggest the Irish Snug?