Legal News

A Question of Courage: The Decision to Prosecute Children

By Dan Slater

In today’s Law Journal column, the WSJ’s Dionne Searcey begins with the following:

In his videotaped confession to the police, the eight-year-old boy sits in an overstuffed office chair and calmly describes how he shot his father and his father’s roommate to death with a rifle. At one point, he buries his head in his jacket and says, “I’m going to go to juvie.”

Boys play basketball at the Polk Youth Institution juvenile detention facility in Butner, N.C. (AP/The News)

Prosecutors in Arizona decided to charge the boy in juvenile court, rather than as an adult. As a result, he could face a trial or plea hearing and end up in a locked facility, designed mainly for teenagers, conceivably until he is 18.

But state laws for charging minors are all over the map, reports Searcey. Only 16 states define an age at which a child is capable of forming criminal intent, according to 2007 figures from the National Center for Juvenile Justice. In North Carolina, the minimum age is six. Most of the other 34 states leave it up to prosecutors, who are then left with the following decision: opt for the juvenile system, which stresses rehabilitation, or charge the child as an adult, satisfying the public’s perceived desire for justice?

“If we look at the foundation of the court, it’s not designed to punish but to help,” says Alida Merlo, professor of criminology at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

“Too often, we get prosecutors that think they’re going to get their 15 minutes of fame by making some kind of zany decision they feel panders to the anger in the public,” says Arthur Busch, a former prosecutor in Michigan who decided not to charge a six-year-old boy who killed a fellow first-grader in a schoolhouse shooting, sending him instead to a foster home. “It takes a lot more courage not to prosecute someone.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 11, 2008 (boomark / email).