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Father of Michigan school shooter found guilty of involuntary manslaughter
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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It's pretty wild that you can charge someone as an adult and then charge their parents.
I really don't get the existence of charging someone as an adult regardless though.
You're charging two adults. The parent is charged with a separate crime. It's like if you enabled someone to commit a crime. That's a crime. That's what's happening here.
They neglected their son's mental health problems and left a gun unlocked at home
But age up everyone 20 years in the story so everyone is more obviously an adult in your head. 60-something year old parents neglecting their adult son's mental health is not their fault anymore. If he's an adult, it's his responsibility. Even if the dad bought the son a gun, if the son is an adult, then the son was responsible for locking it up and keeping it safe.
It makes sense to me to charge a parent for getting their kid access to something dangerous and ignoring safety requirements. Like installing a pool without a fence that a kid drowns in, that's clearly morally the parent's fault. But the kid has to be a kid. Buying your adult child a pool which they later drown in is not the parent's fault. Culpability shifts when the child becomes an adult.
The son is 15. That's still very much the parents responsibility. That's a child who lives with his parents, who can't buy his own gun, who doesn't have the same mental capacity as the 35 year old in your hypothetical.
Great. Don't charge him as an adult then.
These are two separate cases
I'm saying that the case declaring him an adult was wrong to do so, if the facts of the case show that he was a child whose parents are both liable for his actions.
Sure they are separate cases so the legal system can treat him as an adult and a child at the same time. But that's bad. The legal system shouldn't do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors
A person can technically be a child, and then found to be responsible enough to be treated as an adult. To use a fictional example, Dougie Howser, MD was a 14 year old licensed to dispense drugs.
Same deal with charging someone as an adult. If a 14 year old plans a crime over months they can't claim that they acted impulsively or had no idea of what the crime would mean.
I get your argument, but at the end of the day they're a child. I'd argue you can't have the mind of an adult until you're an adult despite how much it seems to emulate as such.
I don't think there's a magic moment when a person becomes 'adult.' A person of 17 years and 11 months old and another person 18 years and three days old aren't fundamentally different.
This whole trail as an adult is just to give out harsher penalties. Honestly it should be renamed to something else as to avoid these discussions. Something like dangerous child proceedings or some such with appropriate handling
Here's a dirty little secret. There are many counties in the US where the Number One employer is the prison system. Those folks have a vested interest in keeping the prisons full.
But there are different places in the legal code to modify punishments against intent, like manslaughter v murder. One would think the idea behind charging someone as a minor is because they are a minor, who by definition has a less developed brain and less worldly experience.
We don't think they're developed enough to vote, and we don't have exceptions to that based on someone thinking really hard about it or really knowing what they're doing. They're just minors, they can't "vote as an adult." Even emancipation is more about separation from parents, it's not gaining full rights as an adult.
That's why it's done on a case by case basis.
I've know 12 year olds who had opened their own bank accounts and could be trusted to care for a baby, and 16 year olds who needed supervision all day.
I'm just pointing out how the laws work, I don't have a stake in the issue.
I'm not like, blaming you. I'm explaining why it doesn't make sense to me.
I don't think it tracks to allow it on a case by case basis. We have one set of punishment for minor offenders and another for adults. It doesn't make sense to be allowed to arbitrarily decide after the fact to charge someone with the more serious set of punishments.
And all of this ignores the fact that juries disproportionately charge black kids as adults, which proves how arbitrary it is in practice.
That's why there are jury trials.
There's a difference between the 16 year old who sees that his neighbor left the keys in her car and impulsively takes a spin, and the 35 year old professional thief who stole three cars that week.
Right, one is under 18 and the other is over 18.
So, someone who is 17 years and 364 days old is a child, and someone who is 18 years and one day old is a mature adult?
That is the fair way to do it, same as voting.
Like I said previously, that's why we have trials and discretionary sentencing.
?
It just makes them accomplices. Same reason you can charge a getaway driver for a murder in a robbery.