When did states start to charge 11 year old kids as adults when they commit crimes?

[Riley18]

[babylonsister]

1. Maybe when they shoot someone in the head after first

wrapping the barrel with a towel to mute the noise? :shrug:

And was the woman about 9 months pregnant, to boot?

[napoleon_in_rags]

3. I feel like people miss the point when they point to severity of the child's crime.

The real problem is that charging the child as an adult places adult levels of responsibility on the child alone. The question for me is who is responsible for an 11 year old wandering around with a shotgun with the knowledge of wrapping towels around the end to silence it. That wasn't the sort of experience I had in 5th grade, so I would like to know what the role of the adults were. I think they should take some responsibility. If you little kids have guns badness is going to happen no matter how many kids are sent to jail.

[Deja Q]

18. If the parents weren't around, then who gets to be pointed at?

Does lil' psycho watch 'The Shield' on FX or something?

[napoleon_in_rags]

29. Whoever left an 11 year old alone with bullets and guns.

These are KIDS were talking about. You can't give them the keys to your car, allow them access to crack or aids infected needles, even though all of the above would be much safer than leaving them alone with guns and bullets.

[dysfunctional press]

13. how does any of that make them any older?

:shrug:

[Cronus Protagonist]

2. I'm against ANY instanceo f charging kids as adults

Because it's a legal FICTION and has no place in a just legal framework.

[HereSince1628]

4. For some crimes, in some states, a long time ago n/t

[Fire1]

17. Ditto. Been happening in Michigan for many years.

[billyoc]

5. A little over 200 years ago.

[MadBadger]

6. I hate it. I dont think Kids should ever ben charged as adults.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. Mid 1990s.

At least the movement got a big boost during the "republican revolution."

That's when you saw a big increase in that. Zero tolerance laws. Support for cruel, unusual, and televised executions.

Essentially racist in its nature.

You also saw more of the same after Columbine.

[Stinky The Clown]

8. When repubicans started to hold sway

I will never, ever believe a child has the mental and emotional capability to be held to the same level of responsibility as an adult.

Charging them as adults is simply revenge.

[bertman]

34. What Stinky said.

[Ilsa]

9. They are not adults. They don't have adult minds. Their brains are not

fully developed. They may know something is wrong, but not fully appreciate the consequences to others or themselves. It is immoral to charge them as adults, and even worse to house them with adult prisoners.

[Deja Q]

19. So bullies and the desire for maliciousness isn't a possibility?

Bullies that age are not abnormal either; the issue is what compelled him to get a gun and try to silence it. If mommy and daddy didn't teach him, who did. And why.

[Ilsa]

33. Is that your excuse for charging him as an adult? Is that an excuse

for jailing him with adult criminals?

Maybe bullies and maliciousness is a possibility. I was only addressing treating a child as an adult criminal.

[FiveGoodMen]

10. When 'Tough on Crime!' became an easy way to get elected.

[Riley18]

11. Children cannot be held to the same legal standards as adults in a country

that values human rights. Could it be possible that some of these horrific crimes involving kids happen because of the adults who are in charge?

[gratuitous]

12. When we let the wet-your-pants crowd run our nation's discourse

That's an approximate estimate. But as long as we let the people who either wet themselves at every loud noise or who persuade others that they should wet themselves at every loud noise run things, we'll see things like this.

Is it disturbing that an 11-year-old would do such a thing and have sufficient knowledge to wrap the barrel of the weapon as a crude silencer? Yes, indeedy. It's damned disturbing. Is it wholly the fault of an 11-year-old that he had this knowledge and that he applied it? Not a chance in hell.

The boy in question has been inculcated in a society of violence, one that turns to violence as the easy quick fix to any problem or difficulty. Someone flew planes into the twin towers? Let's invade Afghanistan and Iraq! So why not blow someone's head off? One doesn't necessarily lead to the other, but in a culture as saturated with violence as ours is, there's no doubt that the lessons of the popular entertainments, the real world and the news of the nation come home to our young people in so many different ways, and it flows directly from the highest levels. No matter what part of our culture you respect, violence is almost always presented as the cure-all solution for a wide variety of problems. People and groups who eschew violence are almost universally condemned or ridiculed as pussies or wimps.

So that's where we got this notion, and that's part of the root cause of why it will continue to get worse. In my demented opinion.

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. In the 1990s

[MrSlayer]

15. Happens all the time, particularly if it's a black kid.

This kid certainly knew what he was doing.

[RamboLiberal]

16. I have mixed feelings about this

First off this is the law in my home state of PA. Doesn't mean the kid will end up with life in prison or that judge can't decide to send him to juvenile. That's just the law on how he is to be initially charged. BTW, this has been the hot subject of Pittsburgh talk radio with a lot of sympathy for the kid. Bet they wouldn't have talked about it if he was black or they'd have been ready to send him up.

Then you have the other extreme. IMHO Golden and his partner Johnson should've spent a longer period of time in prison. From 2007.

LITTLE ROCK -- Somewhere in the United States, Andrew Golden will likely step outside of prison Friday for the first time as a free man since being arrested as an 11-year-old after he and another boy killed four classmates and an English teacher at a Jonesboro middle school.

Golden, the younger of two boys who used deer rifles to kill five people at the Jonesboro Westside Middle School in 1998, turns 21 Friday. With that, he should be eligible to leave an unidentified federal prison where he served a sentence for what likely was a federal firearms conviction.

The uncertainty rests from the closed hearings and sealed court filings that led to his federal incarceration -- such as those that also imprisoned accomplice Mitchell Johnson until his 21st birthday Aug. 11, 2005.

U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin said Thursday he couldn't confirm whether Golden would be released on his birthday. However, when asked about Golden's sentencing, Griffin said "he got as much as time as he could under the law."

"Under the law, that time has run and as a result, he is getting released," Griffin said.

http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/05/24/news/052507arschoolshoot.txt

[cynatnite]

20. Stupid, isn't it?

The hypocrisy of it just boggles the mind. When it comes to every day life, we treat kids like kids. This kid can't drink, drive, vote, marry, join the army or anything else that an adult can do.

Yet, he commits a horrific crime and now he's an adult.

[Taverner]

21. About the time we started locking anyone who looked at a cop funny up

[ecstatic]

22. turns out the boy had been threatening to kill the woman for a full 2 months

before the murder occurred:

PITTSBURGH (Feb. 23) - An 11-year-old boy accused of killing his father's pregnant fiance had been threatening the woman for at least two months, the woman's mother said Tuesday.

Debbie Houk said Jordan Brown often gave 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk a hard time, especially when his father wasn't around. Brown and his dad Christopher lived with Houk and her two small daughters in a farmhouse in the rural western Pennsylvania town of Wampum.

"It's been at least two months that he's made the threats," Debbie Houk said, adding that Jordan "just bucked her (Kenzie) a lot when his Dad wasn't around."

"Chris was good about it. He tried. He told him, 'Don't you ever disrespect her,'" Debbie Houk added.

Jordan Brown was charged as an adult Saturday with killing Houk and her unborn baby boy the day before as she lay in her bed.
Authorities believe the killing was premeditated. They say Brown came downstairs with two guns, but returned upstairs after Houk's 7-year-old daughter saw him; they believe he then hid the gun in a blanket and came back downstairs to Houk's bedroom and shot her in the back of the head.

Later, the 7-year-old girl told police she saw the boy drop something on the ground from his pocket before they got on the bus. Police said they found a spent shotgun shell in the same spot.

http://news.aol.com/article/boy-charged-in-pregnant-womans-death/353423

---

Really-- it's a miracle that the two young witnesses were not murdered as well. Guess he didn't have time to before the school bus came.

[BuelahWitch]

23. From the same story: "...he was going to pop Kenzie in the head

and pop both kids..." The victim's brother in law said the boy told his son that around Christmas time. When he got his gun.

[ecstatic]

31. They thought he was just kidding

How sad. The moral here is to always take threats seriously.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

30. And no one thought about taking his very own shotgun away?

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

24. This shit is going on ten miles from where I am right now.

Satellite uplink trucks all over the place. It's nuts. Nothing ever happens here. NOTHING. And then this. It's awful.

[ozu]

25. Mary Bell

Mary was 10 when she was convicted in the manslaughter deaths of two young boys in 1968, so for at least that long. And that was in England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bell

I'm sure there would be earlier cases if I googled it.

[Scout]

26. when they shoot someone in cold blood n/t

[Name removed]

27. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[varkam]

28. When DAs run for re-election.

The criminal justice system is a democratic one and, as nice as that may be, it has some pretty serious drawbacks. Namely, justice is no longer some nice abstraction that our system of criminal law should aspire to meet but it has become subsumed into the body politik.

The general rule of thumb is the more outraged the public is over the offense, the more likely it will be that the child will be charged as an adult. The public, by and large, doesn't care about justice (or, rather, what justice actually would be in a given situation). Rather, they want blood and retribution. If it will get the DA re-elected, they'll give it to them.

In my opinion, it really is quite a waste of judicial resources and flies in the face of the reasons for having a juvenile justice system in the first place (i.e. kids aren't hardened criminals and so there's a greater chance at rehabilitation, kids brains aren't fully developed, etc).

[mitchum]

32. When those 11 year old kids are murderous predators?

Why don't you foster that little bastard in your house?