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Boy, 15, who fatally stabbed teenager he did not know in Birmingham is jailed for life
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of "boundary exploring" behaviors.
A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with "kids" so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.
The tolerance we have for "youthful indiscretion" does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.
If you're distinguishing by the type of offense instead of by age, you don't have a youth justice system, you have a minor offense justice system.
Distinguishing by the severity of the offense is already part of the justice system.
Youth justice systems explicitly consider the age and maturity of the offender, not just what they did.
Also I'm not sure why a 15-year-old is a kid in one of your examples and a "kid" in the other.
This is not about tolerating behavior, it's about reforming people to become members of society instead of lifelong burdens for the justice system.
Despite the severity of his action, brandishing kids as "irredeemable" not only throws away their entire future but also burdens everyone else with keeping them contained forever.
That profits nobody.
The worst thing that can possibly happen is they reform their lives and some kid decides they are worthy of emulation.
No, the best thing they can do for society is remain locked up for the rest of their lives.
People like you should be locked up
Ooh, edgy.
You got the purpose of juvenile justice completely wrong: It is focussed more on rehabilitation and less on deterrence than the adult one because juveniles are still way more formable. Psychologists will descend upon him, and they'll do the job his parents and neighbours didn't (or couldn't) do, a job which, at 15, noone is able to do on their own.
That's vile. Of course they'll be unredeemable if you don't give them the chance to redeem themselves.
My decision to give or withhold a second chance for this kid is irrelevant.
He can try as hard as he wants to dig redemption out of his victim's grave, but it's simply not possible. Unless you're alleging this kid is some kind of necromancer, he is fundamentally incapable of redemption.
Save the pshrinks for kids who can be saved.
Even if you now demand a life for a life, which isn't your call to make, it very much is possible: He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
You're plain and simply out for blood. An eye has been struck out, and you hide your desire to see the whole world blind behind "well, we don't have to poke it out, we only have to sew it shut" (put him in prison vs. executing).
There's virtually no crime that can be physically redeemed, except for property crimes. Literally any other criminal offense creates an irredeemable injury. But that is exactly why nearly developed country, except for the USA have a redemption-type penal system. How do you measure redemption? Is r*pe redeemed after 4 or 50 years? It will never be for the victim.
But what you can do is try to help everyone to not become criminal again. Because for one, guess what, they're human too. They weren't born criminal and aren't criminal by nature once they've committed a crime. They have the right to live their life as much as the guy they killed. Once you have them forfeit their right to a free life, you commit a similar crime. One that in this case is done by objectifying them as an object rather than a subject.
This thinking is the result of hundreds of years of philosophical thinking and seeing the result of your mindset being used by tyrannys.
If they do not pose a danger to anyone anymore and have reformed then they are to be let go. Also in dubio pro reo.
As for minors, their mind is still developing, they may have cognitively known that killing someone is wrong, but they have not yet accepted it as their own moral. Not knowing even the basics of cognitive development of children, I feel like there's not even a point to discuss with you
Sure. He might save more lives than anyone who has ever existed. The chances of that happening are as good as winning the lottery, but hey, it could happen.
He might also take another life. Or twenty. Or a million. The chances of that are substantially higher: far more people lose the lottery than win anything at all.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. The best approach to playing the lottery is to lock up the money you would have used, and never let it out to buy a ticket.
I find interesting that there's a lot of "might", "maybe" and "possible" when talking about rehabilitation, but not as much attention is paid to the "absolute" of another person's death. Possibilities and potentials won't bring that victim back to life.
If only he was now in a situation where he can be dealt with by specialists who can increase the odds substantially, and only be released if another set of specialists evaluate his mental state to have, as you put it, won the lottery.
Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds. Also, break the European Convention on Human Rights, which demands that there be a light at the end of a tunnel for everyone: Because denying it, no matter how far away it may seem, amounts to taking away his freedom to free development of personality. In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption. To, if not arrive, at least begin to learn to walk into the right direction. Everybody does.
Who are you to make a judgement on the future of his life while the blood on the knife hasn't even dried yet? Can you predict the future? Make a judgement for the here and now, instead.
He can study necromancy for the rest of his life, and attempt to raise his victim from the grave. That's his right. If he accomplishes it, we can talk about clemency.
His right to seek redemption isn't being infringed upon by locking him up permanently. It is the permanence of the death he caused that is denying him redemption.
One comment earlier you seemed to have accepted saving a life as possible repayment for a taken life, now you don't, any more. What happened?
I commented on it, but I never accepted your premise that saving lives counts toward redemption. The reason why is simple: Whatever future potential you envision this kid having, you must also give to the kid he killed. Balancing the number of potential future lives the murderer saves vs the same number of potential lives lost by killing his victim, this kid is always going to be one life short of redemption.
Edit:
Forgot to comment on this earlier:
No, by locking him up forever, you greatly improve the odds that he won't kill again. He is free to explore the development of his personality within the context of having his behavior directly supervised for the rest of his life.
No, he isn't. Literally psychology 101. You're dooming him, how are you going to redeem yourself from that? You'll need, by your own argument, do something that benefits him, not others, or the collective.
He doomed himself. I don't owe him a thing. If I owe anyone anything, it is his victim, not him. If I do owe his victim, locking up his killer for the rest of his life would be my pathway toward redemption.
You locked him up and threw away the key. That is your action, directly affecting his psychology, directly harming him. You may be the judge, the legislator, the juror, the jailer, the voter. You have to account for it.
You justify locking him up by protecting others, but how do you justify the harm you're inflicting?
Then, you're assuming agency on his part. Choice. The kid is 15 FFS, go back in your own life, consider how much, at that age, it was yours, or that of the environment. You also need to argue that he was the reason he killed, and not his environment. Humans don't generally kill other humans, they also don't grow up to do so, something must've happened to him and I very much doubt it was his fault.
What basis do you have for presuming his incompetence?
The fact that he was unsupervised in public tells me he should be assumed to understand the concepts of right and wrong.
Now I don't know where you're from but around here four year olds are unsupervised in public. It's also not about the concept, but about what is considered right and what's wrong, and the self-control to not act on an overwhelming impulse from the unconscious. May I remind you that the frontal cortex, that which gives us the ability to pause and reconsider, is not fully developed at his age.
You have no idea what his psychology looks like, yet you're condemning him, and thousands more, by your principles. Unseen, unheard, and yep that -- unseen, unheard -- is one of the possible depth-psychological reasons why kids lash out like that. Not only do you, self-righteously, condemn him, you also might have created him by the habitual way in which you regard -- or rather don't regard -- people.