Boy, 13, faces life in prison without parole.

[Pit-Jr]

Im putting myself in the grandma's shoes here. Some little hellspawn blew the back of my daughter's head off with a shotgun and killed my grandson in the process. Hes turned my life into a living nightmare. To me, a lifetime in prison doesnt even seem adequate.

[Aimless]

Im putting myself in the grandma's shoes here. Some little hellspawn blew the back of my daughter's head off with a shotgun and killed my grandson in the process. Hes turned my life into a living nightmare. To me, a lifetime in prison doesnt even seem adequate.

Justice and revenge are not the same thing. The point of the law is to be an impartial set of rules.

 

Whatever sentence the kid receives — even if they made it the death penalty — won't be enough for the family left behind. Nothing will; you can't make something like that 'right'.

 

Anyway, the kid's screwed for life either way. If he's a genuine psychopath then he won't be allowed to live a normal life, and if he isn't then his actions will ensure he won't be able to properly function in one anyway.

 

Whichever way he's tried it won't change what he did. If anyone hopes to take anything positive out of the situation it shouldn't be vengeance or even justice, it should be learning from the situation to try and stop something similar happening in the future. Although it'll take a crime far more horrendous to get people fixing their gaze on that particular elephant in the room.

[nightwolf]

It's a difficult one to really argue as I'm pretty much on both sides.

 

Let's start with age.

 

On the one hand, at 11 years of age, most children and yes I will class him as a child and he should be treated as such, but anyway, most children will and do know that if you shoot a loaded gun at someone, it can and does kill them. So although I believe he should be tried as a child, he should still be given a decent sentence IF said child was fully aware of what he was doing.

 

On the other hand if the child is mentally ill, for whatever reason then the child should be dealt with in such a way.

 

Then there's the sententce itself, I'm of the opinion that one shouldn't be a hypocrite, the child took two lives, so in essence the government feels to take away that child's life, the child will only learn to resent the system rather in my opinion than understand, accept and learn from the situation he put himself in. Such as the death sentence, killing the person doesn't fix what has happened, sure the person won't ever be able to do it again, but killing someone for killing someone else leaves me slightly dizzy in the realms of how odd that seems to me. Obviously to others this makes sense, for example I might change my tune if someone decides to shoot my mother in the face, but from a point of trying to be unbiased, it seems confusing, just confusing.

 

I know I'm probably not the best judge towards a child, given I've not had one, or been effected in such a way, but there's obviously a lot of issues that seem to be missing. Why was he pointing a gun at the woman anyway, why the heck was the gun in reach of an 11 year old kid? etc, etc.

[Pancake]

What the fuck is the point of having extremely harsh juvenile laws, whilst simultaneously arming these same juveniles?

 

Wow. That's fucking... wow.

 

That aside (not that it should be put aside), maybe he's a psychopath, maybe he's just a stupid 13 year old that couldn't grasp the extent of what he was doing.

 

Either way, treating him as an adult is not fair. At all. In no other circumstances would a 13 year old be considered an adult.

[Will]

That whole story is fucked up from start to finish, America for you I guess. I have absolutely no idea what the right thing to do in this situation is. I'm not sure there even is a right thing to do. I'd love to know the backstory to this whole fiasco. How on earth this all came to happen is something I just can't get my head around.

[Retro_Link]

He might be a kid, but he murdered a pregnant woman whilst she was sleeping. Sling the evil bastard in jail, whether he deserves to stay their for the entirety of his life is thankfully something I don't have to determine.

 

"He is then alleged to have got on the school bus and gone to his elementary school as usual."

 

Anyone else want to tell me that to blow a sleeping pregnant lady's head off with a shotgun would be reasonable behaviour at 11 years old? No remorse, no feelings of horror of what you've just done?

 

Damn right he should be tried as an adult.

Yeah I agree. Tried as an adult or not, he deserves life.

[nightwolf]

Yeah I agree. Tried as an adult or not, he deserves life.

 

You might as well be done with it and have him killed, one less person to take up space.

[Retro_Link]

You might as well be done with it and have him killed, one less person to take up space.

Yeah you might aswell, premeditated murder deserves nothing less.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

My main qualm is the "life means life" element. The crime itself is one that a judge and jury need to work out, not a bunch of hot-headed forumites who only know what happened from one news article. Clearly there's a lot more going on here than we know about, so it's not our place to infer.

 

If someone commits an evil act I do not think an equally evil act is thus condoned. Sending a child to grow up and die in prison is pretty horrendous in itself. Punishment is rarely going to be apropriately equal to the harm caused in the first place. BLEH. Stupid.

 

Justice and revenge are not the same thing. The point of the law is to be an impartial set of rules.

 

Whatever sentence the kid receives — even if they made it the death penalty — won't be enough for the family left behind. Nothing will; you can't make something like that 'right'.

 

Anyway, the kid's screwed for life either way. If he's a genuine psychopath then he won't be allowed to live a normal life, and if he isn't then his actions will ensure he won't be able to properly function in one anyway.

 

Whichever way he's tried it won't change what he did. If anyone hopes to take anything positive out of the situation it shouldn't be vengeance or even justice, it should be learning from the situation to try and stop something similar happening in the future. Although it'll take a crime far more horrendous to get people fixing their gaze on that particular elephant in the room.

 

[Diageo]

I don't know law enough to be aware of the differences of being tried as an adult or a child. But since he is a child, at 11 when it happened, why shouldn't he be tried as such?

What are the differences?

[chairdriver]

Sometimes I'm glad that our legal system and system of government isn't totally democratic, because many people are idiots.

 

America is a shit country in many ways.

[Tales]

I don't know law enough to be aware of the differences of being tried as an adult or a child. But since he is a child, at 11 when it happened, why shouldn't he be tried as such?

What are the differences?

 

I think it depends on the crime. Things like murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and other grave crimes, the children get tried as adults. I remember reading about two girls at 13 and 14 who got 18 years for attempted murder. One of them faces life in prison if she's convicted a third time(that was her second).

 

As for the boy, like someone said earlier, I'm glad I don't have to judge on this case. I only going to feel sorry for the woman and her child.

[Brian Mcoy]

Mcoy thinks It's horrific a teenager is being charged for murder. Mcoy thinks he should be given cookies instead.

[Goafer]

I'm on the fence on this one. Not because I can see valid arguments from either side, but because I don't care. I'm not going to waste my time hating or feeling sorry for someone I don't know when the only thing I know about them is that they murdered a woman and an unborn baby and showed no remorse for it.

 

I wouldn't expect anyone to care about me if I were in the same situation either.

[EddieColeslaw]

Solution: change the gun laws. Who the hell designs guns especially for kids??

 

But I want to know more about the kid, i.e. whether he has mental health issues. Doesn't seem like the full story's been told. The fiancee could have been an evil person who abused him until he snapped and shot her, or something like that (but I don't know, obviously).

[Paj!]

It's too late for American gun laws to be changed. We just have to deal with the idiocy of them.

[ReZourceman]

Meh, just kill him and be done with it. Dude hasn't had a life anyway so no one'll miss him. Just cut him out of society permanently.

[Esequiel]

Sorry but i agree with Americas laws on this. This is why we have a country full of young thugs doing whatever the fuck they want, because our system is completley fucked up. If our kids knew life meant life maybe they would think twice about pulling the shit that they do. Anyone remember little baby Bulger? I would be much happier if the killers were still behind bars and could never leave.

 

At the age of 11 i knew the difference between right and wrong, this was his step-mum, it could have been a 1 week old step brother.

[Jonnas]

*sigh* Just because this case is clear-cut, and the killer is obvious, and was clearly a mentally disturbed person, it doesn't mean every single case of this is true. Do you really want a potentially innocent child to be put away for life?

 

And even in cases where the guilty party is obvious, who's to say they really are fucked up beyond salvation?

 

This "let's make an entire law for this specific situation" mentality is really short-sighted, you know that?

[Emasher]

Solution: change the gun laws. Who the hell designs guns especially for kids??

 

Lots of kids go hunting/target shooting with their parents in the states. The truth is, very few of them go around killing people. For every case like this, there are hundreds of thousands of people who use guns purely for recreational purposes or self defense. Not to mention the fact that the people who do go around using guns to kill people would either obtain guns illegally, or would use other weapons to do whatever it is they want to do. Perhaps requiring people to take a course in gun laws and safety and passing a test before they can buy them (the way it works here in Canada) would solve some problems, but I don't think banning them outright is the answer. In this case, the kid probably would have used something else to kill his step mum if the gun hadn't been available to him.

 

Now, onto the main issue. The kid's clearly not mentally stable, he's also 11 (or was when he was charged). Does this excuse him from his actions? of course not. However, you have to take them into consideration. Obviously he shouldn't just be found innocent and let go, but I don't think sending him to a federal prison (And everything that happens inside one) for the rest of his life is the answer either. An 11 year old might know the difference between right and wrong, but its also much easier for a kid to be driven over the edge than an adult. I don't know the whole story here, but there was obviously a major problem between the kid and his step mother. When you're 11 you're not mentally mature yet, you can't deal with the sort of situations that this kid was probably in at the time. Just like with depression people are driven to suicide because they feel its the only way out of their problems, the kid probably saw killing his step mother as the only solution to his problems. If this was the situation, I don't think sending him to a federal prison for the rest of his life is appropriate. A mental institution just sounds like a better option to me.

[Jon]

*sigh* Just because this case is clear-cut, and the killer is obvious, and was clearly a mentally disturbed person, it doesn't mean every single case of this is true. Do you really want a potentially innocent child to be put away for life?

 

And even in cases where the guilty party is obvious, who's to say they really are fucked up beyond salvation?

 

This "let's make an entire law for this specific situation" mentality is really short-sighted, you know that?

 

 

How do you know this? There's no reports saying the child was mentally deranged. Your assuming he is because surely an 11 year old child isn't capable of such things. For all you know, he was thinking "I've had enough of you bitch, time to eat some lead". Every case is different, you don't know how advaned that child was for his age, he could hav quite easily been aware of what he was doing, or yes he could have a serious mental health issue. If he's got problems, then by all means give him the help he needs. If this was completely pre-meditated and he knew exactly he was going, fry him on the chair, child or not. Murder is still murder.

[Rummy]

If he's too young to bum, he's too young for life.

 

Sorted.

[Jonnas]

How do you know this? There's no reports saying the child was mentally deranged. Your assuming he is because surely an 11 year old child isn't capable of such things. For all you know, he was thinking "I've had enough of you bitch, time to eat some lead". Every case is different, you don't know how advaned that child was for his age, he could hav quite easily been aware of what he was doing, or yes he could have a serious mental health issue. If he's got problems, then by all means give him the help he needs. If this was completely pre-meditated and he knew exactly he was going, fry him on the chair, child or not. Murder is still murder.

 

In this case, yeah, that works. It's pretty clear that the kid did it on purpose, and the he will either go to prison/the chair or to a mental health institute.

 

Now imagine a case where the child may or may not have done it by accident. Or maybe we aren't 100% sure it really was the child. I am pretty sure plenty of innocent adults are tried for crimes they didn't commit, and are punished with death.

 

In case I'm not clear, I'm going against what ReZ, Esequiel and others have said, saying the U.S. law is in the right. It isn't, because the law should not be tailored to a single, almost-anecdotal case, but to a grander scale. Children should be judged as such, since the vast a majority of them aren't young psychopaths, and courtrooms can make wrong decisions.

 

Let's say the issue in this case was, indeed, mental health problems, that can be treated in an institute. What if the court determines he should get the death penalty instead?

[Cube]

It's too late for American gun laws to be changed. We just have to deal with the idiocy of them.

 

They need a president with enough balls to just suggest it (and then likely be kicked out).

[Oxigen_Waste]

They need a president with enough balls to just suggest it (and then likely be kicked out).

 

It's in the original constitution, so changing it is pretty impossible without a totalitarian regime.