Should 11-year-olds be charged with adult crimes?

An 11-year-old boy in Tennessee is facing first-degree murder charges in the death of an 8-year-old he shot after he asked to see her puppy and she said no. The boy used his father's 12-gauge shotgun, taking it from an unlocked closet, according to a story in the Washington Post. The local prosecutor will decide whether to charge the boy as an adult.Nobody with a soul can seriously ignore the tragic nature of the death of any child. However, two wrongs do not make a right; prosecuting a very young child for murder and sending him to prison for life is tragic in and of itself. It essentially takes the life of another child and causes unimaginable heartache for others.For centuries American and English common law held that children under age 14 were not legally capable of forming criminal intent. For any crime to occur, there must be the convergence of what is known as the "actus reus" (the guilty act) and the "mens rea" (the guilty mind, also known as criminal intent). Without these two necessary pieces, a crime does not exist. State legislatures across America have largely changed the traditional common-law idea that children are unable to formulate criminal intent.

There is no national standard in determining at what age a child can be treated as an adult in the criminal justice system. The result is that approximately 200,000 American children are charged and incarcerated every year -- as adults, according to the Open Society Foundations. Fourteen states have no minimum age at which children can be prosecuted as adults, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. In some cases children younger than 10 have been prosecuted as adults. I suggest that except for extraordinary circumstances, no child under the age of at least 17 should be sentenced to lengthy incarceration in adult jails. It is beyond debate that the human brain does not reach anything close to maturity until the early to mid 20s.Therefore it stands to reason that an adolescent or prepubescent child cannot understand the nature and the consequences of their actions. Why, therefore, in a rational society would anyone think it is appropriate to apply adult consequences to the choices made by children?

#litigation #arbitration