CHILD THRILL KILLERS

If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

~Author unknown

       

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, thousands of children have been sentenced as adults and sent to adult prisons. Nearly 3000 children nationwide have been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Children as young as 13 years old have been tried as adults and sentenced to spend the remainder of their lives in prison.

Is this really a moral or ethical problem, or is this simply the natural evolution of punishment caused by the desensitization of our American youth?

When I was a kid, we handled problems much differently from the youth of today. If we had a fight, we met after school behind the gym, some punches may have been thrown, or more often than not, there was a lot of pushing and shoving.  Very little serious harm was ever inflicted. Afterwards, we would all go to school the next day and life went on. We never tried to kill each other with guns or knives. That thought simply did not exist.

We accepted what our teachers and parents said, even if we did so reluctantly and did not agree. If we had problems in school, our parents met with our teachers, and issues were worked out.  We never dreamed of doing harm to our teachers or others. We knew if we did something way out of line that there would be severe consequences to our actions.  Those consequences actually mattered to us.

It appears that consequences do not matter so much anymore.

Something is happening to our children. The understanding of death and the value of life has become skewed.  I really do not know how this happened. Is it all of the violence on television, movies, and video games? Is it the angst caused by the breakdown of the family? Is it a lack of attention, discipline, or an ever increasing sense of entitlement?  Or, is it simply a mix of a lot of factors that have dangerously lowered the threshold of what acts children now find acceptable?  Honestly, will we really ever know?

The issue raised in this post is whether children who commit heinous acts should be charged as adults for their crimes? In the recent past, children were given more leniency regarding the crimes they committed. However, there appears to be a change in this trend because of the highly publicized brutal and senseless murders that we seem to be hearing about on a daily basis.

It may help to start this discussion with a bit of sad history. In 1944 the youngest person in the past 100 years in the United States was executed. He was a 14 year old African-American child. His name was George Stinney. His death came at the hands of overzealous and very likely racist law enforcement officials in South Carolina who charged him with the beating deaths of two children. The evidence against him was minimal and highly conflicting.

He was executed 84 days after the children were found murdered. At 95 pounds, it has been reported that the straps to keep him in the electric chair didn't fit around his small frame, and an electrode was too big for his leg. Executing teens was not uncommon at that time. Florida put a 16-year-old boy to death for rape in 1944, and Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio and Texas executed 17-year-olds that year.

As a symbolic gesture, lawyers for Stinney’s family are seeking a new trial based on a lack of evidence. Most legal experts believe that, in South Carolina, the verdict will never be overturned.

Back to the present.

A 24 year old Massachusetts high school math teacher was sexually assaulted with an object and murdered by a 14 year old student. He also robbed her of her credit cards and an Iphone. He removed her underwear and took it with him after the murder.

The teacher’s name was Colleen Ritzer.

Her alleged killer, Phillip Chism, was being held without bail after he was charged by the Essex County district attorney as an adult during his arraignment at Salem District Court.

Chism pleaded not guilty. His defense attorney argued for the proceedings to be closed and her client to be allowed to stay hidden because of his age. The judge denied the request. 

Sources say that Chism admitted to police that he had followed Ritzer into a women's bathroom at the school, punched her in the face, and slashed her throat open with a box cutter. He butchered her.  Chism then allegedly put his teacher's body in a recycling bin and brought it to the woods near the school. 

On to Nevada.

Sources state that a 12-year-old student armed with a handgun shot and killed a math teacher and critically wounded two classmates before killing himself at his Nevada middle school shortly before classes were due to begin

Witnesses described a chaotic scene at the school in the northwestern Nevada town of Sparks, located just east of Reno, after the gunfire erupted in an outdoor area as students were arriving for the school day.

"A kid started getting mad and he pulled out a gun and shoots my friend, one of my friends at least," a seventh-grade student identified as Andrew told local KOLO-TV. "And then he walked up to a teacher and says back up, the teacher started backing up and he pulled the trigger."

"The teacher was just lying there and he was limp, he didn't know what to do, he was just in a lot of pain," he told KOLO.

"And me and five other friends went to him and said come on we've got to get him to safety. We picked him up, carried him a little bit far and we left him because our vice principal came along and said go, go, go get to safety, get to safety. So we left the teacher there and we went to safety," Andrew said.

The slain teacher was identified by his family as 45-year-old math teacher Michael Landsberry.

On to Florida.

In Florida, 14-year-old Nathaniel Brazill was tried as an adult and found guilty of second-degree murder for killing his English teacher. According to sources, he “got off lucky” for the shocking murder because a life sentence had been requested from the court. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another Florida jury sentenced 14-year-old Lionel Tate, who allegedly killed a younger girl by smashing her body, to life in prison without parole. He said he was practicing wrestling moves on her.

The above are just a miniscule sample of instances of savage crimes that have been committed by very young children.

What to make of all of the above? Spend a few minutes researching on the Internet and the hair on your back of your neck will stand up.  Brutal, cruel, and vile crimes committed by juveniles appear everywhere. It has been claimed by some sources, that violent crime is actually on the decline.  If this is true, it really does not feel like it with more and more monstrous crimes being reported daily.

I will leave it to you to make your decision regarding whether you think juveniles should be tried as adults and receive sentences comparable to adults. On the one hand, vicious and savage criminals should pay for their crimes. If they happen to be young, that does not justify dishonoring and disregarding the victims who spend their last minutes on this earth dying painfully and violently. Nor, should the eternal heartbreak of their families be disregarded as well.

On the other hand, if you see juvenile criminals as pure products of their environment, lacking the capacity to understand the seriousness of their actions, or simply undeserving of the punishment that an adult would receive for a comparable crime, then your opinion of adequate punishment will obviously be influenced in another direction.

That being said, the execution of a child, such that happened to George Stinney, is unspeakable and inhumane. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this can no longer occur. In Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), the Supreme Court held that the minimum age at the time of crime to be subject to the death penalty is 18, thereby ending execution as a punishment for juvenile offenders.  At the time of the Roper v. Simmons decision, there were 71 juvenile offenders awaiting execution on death row.

My opinion is that if any person, juvenile or adult, purposefully ends someone’s life or injures them with no regard for the sanctity of life, that person should be punished in a manner consistent with their actions. We must not allow life to become a depreciating asset whose value is solely dependent upon the age of a sadistic criminal----- regardless of what known or unknown societal changes are causing certain younger members of our world to become deviant monsters.

-Leonardo G. Renaud