When Do Kids Get Tried as Adults?How to pull a child out of the juvenile justice system.

Remarks from the Fray:

Your article misses the point. Children are children when it is convenient for the state. The current system of "justice" involving juveniles is geared toward the needs and political desires of prosecutors. It is a system that has been so abused since In Re Gault that it almost is nonsensical.

Children can be locked in youth prisons up until age 18 in almost every state when they are problematical, or unruly, or otherwise annoying to their parents. They can be arrested and sentenced to youth prison for running away from sometimes abusive parents or for skipping school. We do this because we "care" about a youngster's upbringing. We show our caring nature by utilizing pepper spray and shackles on children as young as seven. Sometimes we show our caring nature by dragging a five year old from the classroom in handcuffs after the toddler has had a tantrum. We do these things because we love our children in America.

We also prosecute adults for coercing children under 18 into sexual conduct because young people are purportedly too immature to make such decisions for themselves, and they can be manipulated by adults. But when a child commits a sexual act involving another child, he is perceived to have the maturity to understand sexual conduct in the same way as an adult, and may be prosecuted as such. A child - even at age 10, can wind up on a public sex offender registration because he smacked another child's bottom in a "sexual way." Hence, our sex offenses involving child perpetrators have skyrocketed, while they have remained stable in almost every other country in the world.

God help the child in the United States who commits an actual crime in the era of zero tolerance and "victim's rights." That child is presumed to have a free will, criminal sophistication, and the ability to control even the adults around him. It matters not what the child thought, but how sensationalistic the crime, and how much coverage the mainstream media gives it.

Our system used to allow for the conviction of children when a prosecutor overcame a rebuttable presumption of incapacity on the part of someone between 7 and 14. Somewhere along the way we lost our way and stopped considering the capacity of the person doing the deed - regardless of his age. And of course, our age of criminal responsibility - usually 7 in most states - is about the youngest in the entire world. European Union countries do not allow children under 10 (and sometimes 12 or 14) to be tried for anything and they have stringent standards for allowing young people to face adult penalties - with the minimum age generally set at 16, and sometimes not until 21. So if we are sentencing people at age 10 to "juvenile life," what sanctions are left for people age 12 or 13? Nothing will seem harsh enough.

So, the United States is one of the harshest countries in the world when it comes to juvenile sentencing. Reverse certification is the norm for children between 13 and 18, and a handful of states, including Florida, South Carolina and Pennsylvania set no minimum age limits for prosecution of children as adults for homicide. Numerous other states have gone with "blended jurisdiction" - which this article did not mention. For instance, this week in Texas, a 13 year old boy was sentenced to 40 years for killing at age 12, a sibling. He will begin his sentence in juvenile jurisdiction and probably transfer to the adult system at age 17.

Blended sentencing is quite in vogue. It allows prosecutors to sleep at night, knowing that the often very young people that they have destroyed won't be raped for a few more years. Sometimes the prosecutors play the "nice" card after sending someone as young as 12 to adult prison, by keeping the child in a youth prison until age 18. A couple of examples would be Christopher Pittman in South Carolina and Tyler Edmonds in Mississippi. New Jersey does not have blended sentencing.

It is interesting that in a case that involves a brutal career criminal, aged 28, as well as at least one other adult offender in his late 20's, we are discussing two fifteen year olds who likely played a peripheral role in the case. Numerous adults from their neighborhood already have mentioned that at least one of the boys was a nice kid, easily led, who was probably "just there." He apparently loved hanging out with the older guys in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, that is often the case of youngsters charged as adults in homicide cases - when these cases involve young teens, they often are being manipulated by older people or peer pressure, gang initiations, or things unlikely to induce an adult to take part in illegal conduct. Most criminal homicide prosecutions of youngsters under 16 have involved "felony murder," where children are charged by virtue of their presence at a crime, or their participation in another crime - or for just plain being immature and stupid.

Face reality - we were never very easy on our kids. We just take the handful of cases where kids get off easy (as opposed to adults who get off easy) and claim that it was because of the youngster's status as a juvenile.

So whither New Jersey? Likely the prosecutor here will cite "free will" as the basis for sending these two youngsters to Rahway to be used as rape fodder - and then he'll probably go out and prosecute some other adult for putting a child in danger of sexual abuse. I don't doubt that the prosecutor and those who likewise support using children as political props in this manner sleep well on earth. I can only hope that when afterlife justice judges these people, it shows just as much compassion as they did.

--yerevan2

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