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Should these teens be tried as adults

Should the 15 and 16 year old also be tried as adults

  • yes and throw away the key

    Votes: 72 87.8%

  • no, they deserve a second chance

    Votes: 10 12.2%
  • Total voters
    82
ChrisL said:
I think kids under 17 are worth trying to rehabilitate. Whether or not it works is another thing entirely but it's totally worth the effort when it comes to such a young life IMO. I don't know all the details to this specific case, so I don't really feel comfortable going into any detailed kind of plan for these particular kids.
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It appears the evidence is piling up. That's an awfully propitious statement for alleged premeditated murderers.
 
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Μολὼν λαβέ;1062218598 said:
It appears the evidence is piling up. That's an awfully propitious statement for alleged premeditated murderers.
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That isn't new.
 
Quit dragging me back into this thread. I've already said everything I need to say and posted links. Anything else is just useless arguing.
 
Μολὼν λαβέ;1062218598 said:
It appears the evidence is piling up. That's an awfully propitious statement for alleged premeditated murderers.
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I believe that one of them is a white kid. At least if the mug shots I saw were the three who have been accused.
 
Goshin said:
Has no relationship to what actually happens in court; hyperbole.
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Hyberbole? D'ya think?
Do we still have a discussion about juvenile offender rules? I'm saying either try everyone under the same set of rules or have a different set of rules for juvenile offenders. Not either-or at the same time.
 
lizzie said:
Ummm, exactly what do you think the definition of justice is? The symbol for justice is a pair of scales. Justice is the method used to balance those scales. Iow, if you kill someone, justice would require that you pay with your own life. Equal measure.
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What you are talking about is a system of justice which looks only at the past,at what has happened and has no vision for the future.

I believe that we can do better than that.
 
lizzie said:
Ummm, exactly what do you think the definition of justice is? The symbol for justice is a pair of scales. Justice is the method used to balance those scales. Iow, if you kill someone, justice would require that you pay with your own life. Equal measure.
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I thought we'd gotten beyond the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" conception of justice. Perhaps not.

You know that the scales of justice have nothing to do with the apportioning of punishment. You have incorrectly depicted the symbolism. It is a symbol of the balance between the two forces within a trial; the prosecution and defence. It doesn't call for one hurt to be countered with an equal and opposite hurt visited on the perpetrator. That's your invention, I'm sorry to say.
 
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molten_dragon said:
No, they shouldn't be tried as adults. If 18 is going to be the dividing line between a child and an adult, then that should be applied across the board. It's unfair to expect someone to uphold all the responsibilities of an adult while enjoying none of the privileges of being an adult.

However, I also think sentencing should be changed so that it doesn't matter as much if you're tried as an adult or a child. Someone who commits a crime like this should be incarcerated and rehabilitated until they are deemed safe to return to normal society, regardless of their age. Prisoners would still be separated by age, and the rehabilitation for younger children might take a different form, but they'd still be the responsibility of the state until they were deemed safe. They shouldn't just be turned loose at 18 or 21 or whatever the age is in their state.
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So basically you would give every little punk kid gang banger a license to kill.
 
molten_dragon said:
I'm really struggling to understand how you could read what I posted and come away with that.
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Because unless you are calling for death or LWP, you're soft on criminals. Apparently. According to some.
 
Chris Lane shooting a gang initiation, says father who called police


Duncan, Oklahoma: Chris Lane was murdered as a part of a gang initiation, according to James Johnson, the father of a boy who was also allegedly targeted by the three youths accused of killing Mr Lane.

Police have not commented on the claim, though court documents confirm the accused were eventually arrested in front of the boy's home.

In their car, police say they found a shotgun and the .22-calibre revolver they believe was used to kill Mr Lane, and a cache of ammunition.
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It just keeps getting worse and some people still want these POS scumbags to be treated like "children".
 
Andalublue said:
Because unless you are calling for death or LWP, you're soft on criminals. Apparently. According to some.
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What crime would a 15, 16, 17 yr old have to commit, in your view, to be subject to the death penalty or LWP? Clearly, you don't think driving around, bored, and executing a total stranger for the fun of it passes the bar in your view, so what would?
 
Bodhisattva said:
1. Perhaps... though a person with a vendetta would most likely not be suffering from ennui.
2. The police plant guns all the time. They are probably the prime suspect. A cop probably shot the Aussie and then planted the gun to frame the kids...
3. The eyewitnesses were found after the event. It was probably all staged.
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Undoubtedly a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino with the stars to be announced later.
You are obviously a law scholar--not!
 
ChrisL said:
And children as young as 7 could and were given the death penalty before. And experts claim an 80% success rate with rehabilitation. So I guess you'll have to call them and argue that you know and all the people here know better than the experts about recidivism and rehabilitation as it pertains to juveniles.
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Do you actually think bringing in absurd examples changes anything? 7 year olds? I'm sorry, but this discussion was working along rational lines. I'm not interested in crazy.
 
CanadaJohn said:
What crime would a 15, 16, 17 yr old have to commit, in your view, to be subject to the death penalty or LWP? Clearly, you don't think driving around, bored, and executing a total stranger for the fun of it passes the bar in your view, so what would?
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I don't believe in the death penalty for anyone, in any circumstances. I also don't believe in mandatory sentencing at all. Either you trust your judiciary to take the right decision on the basis of the detailed assessment of each individual case, or you dispense with them altogether and hand over your judicial system entirely to politicians and their agenda-driven tariffs.

Life without the possibility of parole seems like a populist sop to those who hanker after the death penalty being applied for currently non-capital offences, but offences that nevertheless stir up the frothing outrage of the media and the mob. Would I say that these kids have so crossed the line of morality that in 10, 20, or 40 years time there's absolutely no possibility that they could live law-abiding and useful lives as members of a community? No, I wouldn't say that at all. I'd say the opposite. I'd say that in a number of years time, properly assessed and with a regime aimed at rehabilitation as well as punishment and exclusion, there's every possibility (not necessarily likelihood, but it's possible) for someone to reform. Hence, a LWP tariff is counter-productive.

With these boys, only one of whom thought it such a good idea to kill someone that he actually pulled the trigger, despite the fact that there was more than one weapon in the car, to say that there's zero possibility of any of them ever being able to live normal lives is a condemnation of the Oklahoma penal system as much as it is of their supposedly incorrigible nature. There does seem to be a train of thought running through many of these crime-related threads on DP that assumes that the only thing you can expect of the penal system is to prevent offenders and the general public from ever encountering one another again. That there are two types of people, crims and non-crims and that there's no redemption whereby the latter can return to being the former have once stepped across a line. I don't buy that.
 
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The question put in the OP was not "Should these teenagers get away with murder?" nor was it "Were their actions excusable because of their ages?"

The question was of a legal variety - "Should these teenagers be tried as adults?" And by extension - "In the event that their actions are reprehensible enough; should any children be judged by adult standards?"

There are good and justifiable reasons why there are juvenile courts and a juvenile justice system in every developed society on earth. We who are adults realise that while children can often be deliberately delinquent, they have not yet developed the capacity for fully understanding the effects of their actions - even murder. So we treat them as not fully developed beings and judge them by different standards, even when they commit the most horrible crimes. This is the way the civilised world operates, and it has taken us milennia to arrive at this stage of development.

A further peril of the simplistic (and ungrammatical) 'do the crime, do the time' ethos is where one draws the line. Is killing your father because he has incessantly bashed you all your life, as bad as killing your mother because she served you rhubarb pudding yet again, and she knew you hate the stuff? And what may be considered perfectly acceptable treatment of children in one subset of society, may be totally unacceptable in an other - so how do we decide when a crime merits the juvenile being judged as an adult?

So we opt for the safer course of an arbitrary age, whereafter one is legally an adult, and must be treated and judged as such. There should never, ever, be any question of a juvenile being judged by adult legal standards, whatever the circumstances.
 
Andalublue said:
I don't believe in the death penalty for anyone, in any circumstances. I also don't believe in mandatory sentencing at all. Either you trust your judiciary to take the right decision on the basis of the detailed assessment of each individual case, or you dispense with them altogether and hand over your judicial system entirely to politicians and their agenda-driven tariffs.

Life without the possibility of parole seems like a populist sop to those who hanker after the death penalty being applied for currently non-capital offences, but offences that nevertheless stir up the frothing outrage of the media and the mob. Would I say that these kids have so crossed the line of morality that in 10, 20, or 40 years time there's absolutely no possibility that they could live law-abiding and useful lives as members of a community? No, I wouldn't say that at all. I'd say the opposite. I'd say that in a number of years time, properly assessed and with a regime aimed at rehabilitation as well as punishment and exclusion, there's every possibility (not necessarily likelihood, but it's possible) for someone to reform. Hence, a LWP tariff is counter-productive.

With these boys, only one of whom thought it such a good idea to kill someone that he actually pulled the trigger, despite the fact that there was more than one weapon in the car, to say that there's zero possibility of any of them ever being able to live normal lives is a condemnation of the Oklahoma penal system as much as it is of their supposedly incorrigible nature. There does seem to be a train of thought running through many of these crime-related threads on DP that assumes that the only thing you can expect of the penal system is to prevent offenders and the general public from ever encountering one another again. That there are two types of people, crims and non-crims and that there's no redemption whereby the latter can return to being the former have once stepped across a line. I don't buy that.
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This kind of thinking is perhaps why Spain is virtually bankrupt. I'm curious - how many of the Madrid terrorist bombers from 2004 have been sufficiently rehabilitated to date?
 
CanadaJohn said:
This kind of thinking is perhaps why Spain is virtually bankrupt. I'm curious - how many of the Madrid terrorist bombers from 2004 have been sufficiently rehabilitated to date?
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Are you equating 3 bored juvenile delinquents in Oklahoma with Al Qaeda operatives? That's funny stuff!
 
This incident is tragic. A person needlessly lost his life. He was "unjustly killed". His "right to life" was violated. His parents, siblings, extended family, and friends will suffer from his death for a long time to come. 3 lives will be forever be symbols of evil in its purest form. The parents, siblings, and extended families of the 3 teens involve in the killing will suffer in many ways, but also be judged as the legal process moves forward to prosecute the teen boys.

My personal position is: The offenders are incarcerated and the justice system and statutes of the State of Oklahoma will define their fate.

For those who are support the "death penalty", the following link provides substantial information regarding "Juveniles and the Death Penalty" for most every state. I might add that the Supreme Court has intervened in the 80s regarding the death penalty for juveniles. It appears that the SC case most relevant today is "Thompson vs Oklahoma".

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/184748.pdf
 
CanadaJohn said:
Are you trying to claim that some murder of an innocent is more acceptible than others?
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I'm claiming that committed terrorists blowing up 191 innocent civilians are probably less likely to be rehabilitated than three adolescents whose ennui and stupidity led to the death of a single innocent man. I'm guessing you disagree.
 
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