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Even an adult who killed a person for that reason, would, very likely, with a decent lawyer, get off with an insanity plea. Especially if there was a record of psychiatric treatment.
Alyssa Bustamante should have just waited until she was 18 and then enrolled in the armed forces if she wanted to know what it was like. Lots of terrorists to kill in Afghanistan.
Even an adult who killed a person for that reason, would, very likely, with a decent lawyer, get off with an insanity plea. Especially if there was a record of psychiatric treatment.
Oh, jt, do not doubt the game of CYA. They plan for this in advance. I wish that I could show you some of these cases.
Alyssa Bustamante should have just waited until she was 18 and then enrolled in the armed forces if she wanted to know what it was like. Lots of terrorists to kill in Afghanistan.
In other words, given the chance to legally, even heroically, murder 7 year old girls cowering behind their mother's skirts.
Does anyone know the difference between and argument, and a debate?
Debate is not a clearly defined concept, and the term can be generally and loosely applied to any argument in which the participants are constrained by agreed-upon rules.
The real question is, does anyone know the difference between Great and Slipshod?
The modern social construct has served to prolong the childhood of otherwise adult people. I don't think we can go much further with our notions of delayed adulthood and survive the consequence with a straight face.
Most of the young today are being exposed to a much more violent world than those raised a half century ago, we used to have home, school, church, and community, some of those have survived but not without making many adaptations to TV , movies, and social networking. Now we have the childeren living in a world where thay are always connected to the peer group, pulling away from those adult based endeavors that clash with their media derived culture.
When these kids are interviewed in prison a few years into adulthood, they always seem to understand the situation much better than they did when they committed their crime. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to engage the youth with some work activities that provide help in their communities, get them to make that connection between belonging and contributing. Once you feel outside of the society you live in you have little to fear from incarceration and isolation from that society.
Should we just continue to look for ways to punish, or would it be to our benefit to look for the root causes of each and every crime committed by children? Our economic and social systems are becoming breeding grounds for the monster kids of the future. For now we'll have to consider some of their crimes worthy of adult punishment and lock them up, but, that doesn't get us off the hook, we still need to learn how to prevent these kids from going down that path.
There seems to be a national nannyism here that locks people into childhood to an unrealistic age. There is almost no place in the world where the legal age of consent is as high as 18, except in about ten US states. There is almost no place in the world where the legal drinking age is as high as 21, except the USA. In most other western countries, almost anything sexual can be shown on TV without fear that a teenager will see it and run hormonally amok. America becomes the laughing stock of the world, when we go ballistic (and euphemistic) over wardrobe malfunctions.
Yet, teenagers get into a great deal more trouble in the USA than in most other countries, and when they become young adults are more likely to be sent to prison in the USA than any other country in the world.
Maybe it is appropriate that we try young offenders as juveniles, since we insist on forcing them into the straitjacket of childhood for so long. How can we expect them to become mature if we don't let them.
In many states adulthood in criminal courts is the age of 17.
So, if there is a 17 year old that gets into an argument with a neighbor because she won't let him borrow her grill and he takes his car and runs over her 3 times, do you still want to see him tried as a juvenile?
Does anybody think a person suddenly and magically become mature at 12:01 AM on his 18th birthday? Except a few particularly heinous crimes where maturity occurs on an earlier date? Or should the people we pay to be judges get to exercise some common sense about whether a defendant is mature enough to stand trial?
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