Should sending young killers to prison for life OK?

Before I explain why I feel that sending young teenage killers to prison for as much as twenty-five years is just, I will give you examples of some of the murders they committed.

Two thirteen-year-old boys had been lurking along Andrews Avenue in the Bronx, New York City for hours, on February 26, 2006 looking for an easy target to rob. They found a victim to rob. The 13-year-olds demanded a 15-year-old boy’s cell phone, and when the boy refused to hand it over to the two young thugs, an argument broke out and 15-year-old victim was stabbed three times — in the wrist, the abdomen and the chest. Their victim was bleeding heavily as he staggered home. He reached his front door and was able to pound on it before he collapsed on the threshold. His mother came out and cradled him. Later, she said that when she saw her son's pupils dilate; she knew he might not survive. He was pronounced dead at 7:29 p.m. at Lincoln Hospital, the hospital where he was born.

In August 2008, police arrested a 15-year-old boy connection with the death of a Mississauga, Ontario teen who was shot and killed in a grassy field just steps away from a busy community centre. Evan Popoola, 15, was found shot to death in the football field behind St. Jude Separate School on Nahani Way in Mississauga Friday evening around 6:30 p.m.

Two girls living in Mississauga, who were 16 and 15 on January 18, 2003 when they plied their mother with booze and Tylenol 3, helped undress her and coaxed her into a bath they'd drawn. The older one pushed her mother’s head beneath the water, holding it down at least four minutes, while the younger sister watched from the bathroom doorway. Their mother drowned. The 15-year-old had secured the pills and it is suspected that she may have been the one who actually devised the scheme. Their motive was that they were so exasperated by their mother who was all the time crashed out on the couch, often semi-naked even when friends came by, that they fantasized about killing her. After the funeral, the older girl joked afterward that maybe their six-year-old brother might get run over by a car at which point his share of the insurance money would then only be divided between his two sisters.

On January 2, 2008, police charged two Toronto teens in the city's first homicide of 2008 after a 14-year-old girl was stabbed to death the previous night. The police arrested a 17-year-old male and a 15-year-old female at an apartment just blocks from where the victim was found bleeding on the frozen sidewalk. Both suspects were charged with first-degree murder.

Jeremy Vojkovic, was just 15 years old in 2002 when he attacked 39-year-old Colleen Findlay after she found him rummaging through her horse barn in Maple Ridge, British Columbia one November morning, minutes after waving goodbye to her dentist husband, two sons and daughter. Vojkovic told police that he bound the woman with duct tape and sexually assaulted her before taking her back into the victim’s house, where he slit her throat three times with a Swiss Army knife. Those slashes didn't kill her, so Vojkovic doused her and the house with gasoline and then set her and the house on fire. She died as a result.

A 15-year-old boy was charged in February 2008 in the shooting deaths of his parents and two younger brothers at their home in a Baltimore, Maryland suburb. Nicholas Browning faces four counts of first-degree murder in the slayings. Browning was arrested after he admitted to killing his father, John Browning, 45; his mother Tamara, 44; and his brothers Gregory, 13, and Benjamin, 11. Baltimore County Police said that the teen said he had a disagreement with his father and used his father's handgun to kill his family.

In 2008 in Pasadena, Texas, two teenage girls stabbed a 75-year-old man to death in a robbery. All they found on his body was $15.00. The mother of one of them put the girls up to it. Dannette Gillespie, 38, gave her 15-year-old daughter and the girl’s 19-year-old friend the knives to rob the man and then she waited in her car and watched.

In Emory, Texas in March 2008 a weekend ambush left a mother and her two sons dead and the father wounded; a grisly shooting and stabbing attack authorities say was carried out by the family's teenage daughter and her boyfriend her parents disliked. The 16-year-old girl joined her boyfriend and two others in killing members of the family in their bedrooms before setting their house on fire.

Sixteen-year-old Timothy Brown, of Miami was charged with first-degree murder and armed burglary in an occupied dwelling. He later pleaded guilty in May 2008 to second degree murder of Redskins star Sean Taylor in his home. Taylor died of massive blood loss after he was shot at his Miami-area home during a botched robbery the previous November.

In July, 2008, in Surrey, British Columbia, the police filed charges against three teens and a young man in the stabbing death of a 14-year-old boy who was killed by what he thought was a group of new friends. Two girls, aged 15 and 16, and an 18-year-old male, who was 17 at the time, are charged with second-degree murder in the death of Justin Vasey. Cody Allan Pelletier, 20, is charged with manslaughter.

A 16-year-old boy in Winnipeg, Manitoba was ordered to serve an 11-year prison sentence for two brutal attacks within hours of each other -- one of them fatal, the other a near-miss that left his victim suffering permanent brain damage. Luke Pierre Thomas Beardy pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the September 2007 beating death of 21-year-old Kyle Boss and to aggravated assault for beating another man just three hours earlier.

An Edmonton teen killer was sentenced as an adult to life in prison for murdering Evan Grykuliak at the victim's 17th birthday party. The young killer was 16 at the time he committed the crime. The most he can be forced to serve in Canada is only ten years.

Brandon Piekarsky, 16, and Colin Walsh, 17, both of Shenandoah, Texas, were charged in September 2008 with criminal homicide and related offenses. They and another older youth kicked a 25-year-old man to death in a park.

This is just a small sampling of the thousands of murders committed by teenagers under 18 years of age worldwide. Some of them are younger. For example, a 12-year-old girl living in Calgary, Alberta was charged in 2006 along with her boyfriend for the murder of her parents and eight-year-old brother. Acquaintances of the girl said that she told them that she was grounded by her parents because of the relationship with 23-year-old Jeremy Allan Steinke and that is why they killed her parents. Her brother was a witness and therefore she felt that he too had to die.

Youth homicides in Canada hit a record high in 2006, Statistics Canada reported. The homicide rate among youth aged 12 to 17 was three per 100,000, with 84 young people charged in 54 killings.

In 2001, a 14-year-old Florida boy was sentenced to life in prison for killing a 6-year-old girl. The boy, Lionel Tate, was 12 at the time of the slaying. Up to that year, he became the youngest person in the United States to receive a life sentence in prison.

A 13-year-old baby sitter and an 11-year-old boy in Cincinnati were charged in the brutal beating death of an 8-year-old girl at her Cincinnati home in August 2001. The boys are believed to be the youngest people ever accused of murder in Cincinnati, Ohio. Because both were younger than 14, they could not be tried as adults in Ohio and would face at most, if convicted, imprisonment until age 21.

In December, 2006, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States as the lone dissenter.

Prosecutors and victims’ rights groups say that some murders committed by young offenders are so terrible and those young persons convicted of them are so dangerous that only life sentences without the possibility of release are a fit moral and practical response. I agree to some degree with such an opinion except the part in which they suggest that the offenders should never be released from prison at all. I would rather see them eligible to apply for parole after they have served twenty-five years for first degree murder and fifteen years if convicted of second degree murder.

Specialists in comparative law acknowledge that there have been occasions when young murderers who would have served life terms in the United States were released from prison much earlier in Europe and went on to kill again.

It has been said that teenagers are different from older criminals — less mature, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to change for the better. I agree with the first two aspects of that statement but I am not convinced about the third aspect. As a counselor in a detention centre, in which I see hundreds of inmates a year, I see many inmates who as adults, are facing or have been convicted of criminal acts while they are adults who previously committed crimes as young offenders. They hadn’t changed at all.

A United States Supreme Court decision in 2005 applied to 72 death-row inmates, almost precisely the same number as the 73 prisoners serving life without parole for crimes committed at ages 13 or 14.

A 2005 written by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report written by focuses on the youngest offenders, locating 73 juvenile lifers in 19 states who were 13 and 14 when they committed their crimes. Pennsylvania has the most, with 19, and Florida is next, with 15. In those states and Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina and Washington, 13-year-olds have been sentenced to natural life in prison. In most of the cases, the sentences were mandatory, an automatic consequence of a murder conviction after being tried as an adult.

Under Alaskan law, first and second-time juvenile offenders are typically punished with a letter that is sent to their parents from the authorities.

In 2007, there were 6,548 young people under the age of 18 charged with murder or manslaughter in the United States. The number of male young offenders arrested that year for murder and non-negligent manslaughter increased 27.3 percent from the number arrested in 2003, and the number of females arrested for this offense increased 10.5 percent.

The minds of children and youths.

Between the ages of 2 and 3, humans develop a conscience. But at what age do they develop interpersonal reasoning, emotional understanding and thoughts and feelings about themselves and others?

Children start with a very general set of ground rules given to them by their parents and teachers that underlie moral choices. Studies conducted by child psychologists show that young children demonstrate a consistent ability to make judgments in situations involving fairness, truth, and selfless concern for the welfare of others. (empathy) It would appear from the studies that the Golden Rule comes pretty close to what kids start with when they first look around and confront the need to make moral choices.

It is the cruelty of children---often ignored by adults as a phase of youth---that can be a major contributor to the damaged psyches of teenagers. Feelings of hurt and humiliation can evolve into deep anger at the world and long-standing feelings of isolation and ostracism.

Admittedly, it is tough to be a kid nowadays. For example, if a child is the victim of continuous harassment by other children, it hurts. If the harassment is persistent, it can leave permanent scars. It can also lead to violence and often that violence results in the victims retaliating by killing (usually by shooting) those who tormented them. If the child lives in a dysfunctional home with abusive parents and siblings, the violence can lead to the murder of his or her parents and/or siblings. I remember counseling a young teenager at the Vancouver Detention Centre in 1955 who had been charged with battering his older sibling to death with a baseball bat. He said that his brother was always teasing him.

Millions of decent parents are forced today to wage a continual battle to preserve the innocence of their children (particularly in sexual matters) against a rising tide of corrupting influences in the media, public schools, school mates and other friends along with the culture at large. Unfortunately, a great many of the parents lose the battle and refuse to fight on.

In a book called, The Development of Judgment and Decision Making in Children and Adolescents, I read an interesting observation by the authors in which they stated that people make flawed choices for four possible reasons: (a) They have faulty knowledge or beliefs (i.e., they think that an action will have a desired effect but it won't, or they think that they are in a certain type of context but they are not); (b) they have maladaptive values (i.e., they do not value their own physical, emotional, or financial well-being); (c) they have accurate knowledge and adaptive values but fail to activate this stored knowledge in a particular situation; or (d) they activate accurate knowledge and values but cannot figure out how to coordinate multiple goals in that situation. To clarify the fourth issue, it is reasonable to argue that an option that is likely to improve several aspects of physical health and emotional health and financial well-being (or at least does not ruin the latter) is to be preferred over options that are likely to only improve one of these aspects (or options that improve one while damaging the other two). Because the world is rather complex (i.e., it contains tangles of intertwined variables) and most people care about lots of things, focusing on single goals when one has several is bound to lead to losses or problems in one or more areas of one's life. But it often takes a certain amount of talent to figure out solutions that satisfy multiple conflicting goals (e.g., how to stay sober while avoiding ridicule from one's friends at a party). Hence, many people make poor decisions in such situations.

I have conducted individual and group counseling sessions in correctional institutions and detention centres in Ontario for many years and what I have observed in dealing with the many adult male prisoners, including those in their late teens I counselled, is that in practically every one I counselled, they definitely knew the difference between right and wrong and when faced with issues in which morality and empathy played an important role, they knew how to come up with satisfactory solutions to the complex problems I presented to them relating to morality and empathy. I have come to the conclusion (right or wrong) that despite what they may have experienced in dysfunctional homes as children, the differences between right and wrong was still ingrained in their minds and their concept of morality and empathy for others remained with them. What brought them face to face with our justice system is that their problems were no different that what smokers go through when addicted to tobacco. They knew that their life style was not good for them but to quote an often quoted phrase, the flesh is weaker than the spirit.

At what age does criminal responsibility begin?

Inconsistency still remains world-wide regarding the minimum age of responsibility, with Mexico opting for the age of six, in South Africa, it begins at seven. In Scotland, it begins at eight. In the Philippines, it begins at nine. In Australia, the age of responsibility begins at ten years of age however, that only applies if the prosecution can rebut this presumption, by showing that the accused child was able at the relevant time to adequately distinguish between right and wrong. The age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Turkey, is eleven years. In Canada, it begins at twelve years of age as it also does in Greece and the Netherlands. In France, the age of responsibility begins at thirteen. In Germany, it begins at fourteen. In Egypt, it begins at fifteen as it also does in Norway. In Argentina, the age of criminal responsibility begins at sixteen years of age. Within the United States, different states having settled on different age guidelines for criminal responsibility but generally the age of criminal responsibility in most parts of the United States is sixteen or eighteen years of age.

In Canada, our legislation that deals with young offenders is called The Youth Criminal Justice Act. Some say that incarceration of our young offenders under the Act is overused and as a result, Canada has the highest youth incarceration rate in the Western world, including the United States.

What is the appropriate sentence for murder?

With respect to the sentence for murder, the maximum penalty for first or second degree murder for young offenders is ten years in close custody providing that the convicted young offender is over the age of 14 and the court classes the young offender as an adult. The Act also provides graduated sentencing. When a graduated sentence is given, a convicted youth will spend two-thirds of his/her time in custody, and one-third in the community under supervision.

The attitude towards the sentencing parameters for young killers that is shared by many Canadians; is that young offenders who murder innocent people should be held responsible for their actions and be given longer sentences. This does not appear to be shared by the architects of the Youth Criminal Justice Act or the Canadian Department of Justice. I can only presume that these people who drafted up the Act have never been family members of loved ones who have been killed by young offenders.

I think Canadians for the most part would prefer that our judges be permitted to give sentences that are parallel with the one given to a 17-year-old boy living in Kentucky, USA who admitted to killing his parents in December, 2003. His motive was that he had a troubled relationship with his father because he and his father argued daily during the six months leading up to the murders. He claimed he didn’t know why he killed his mother. The youth was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

I agree with that kind of sentence for young offenders sixteen and seventeen years of age who kill their victims for such mundane reasons. I am not thinking of rehabilitation because you cannot rehabilitate someone that evil who wasn’t already habilitated in the first place. I am thinking of protection of society and also retribution.

Don’t underestimate the importance of retribution. It is necessary if the surviving family members and close friends of the victims are going to get any form of closure.

To my readers, I ask this rhetorical question. Do any of you really believe that you will get closure if a sixteen-year-old murderer who deliberately kills all the members of your immediate family; (spouse and children) only serves six and a half years in a young offender correctional facility and then is free to spend the next 70 years of his or her life enjoying life to its fullest in the community; enjoyment of life that he denied your loved ones?

Perhaps to the architects of The Youth Criminal Justice Act, and some of the people working in the Canadian Justice Department, that wouldn’t be a problem to them but I am convinced that it would be a real problem for the vast majority of Canadians.

Fortunately, the present prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper agrees with this premise. He recently announced that if he is re-elected, he will advocate life in prison for young offenders who are 14 years or older who murder other human beings. I would rather see the ages of 16 and over being the appropriate ages where such young murderers would be sentenced to that long a sentence.

If we have to choose between the best interests of a 16-year-old murderer who kills without any form of remorse or empathy for his or her victims or their families, and the surviving families of the victims, I for one will choose the interests of the surviving members of the deceased every time. The young murderer didn’t care about anyone, so why should we care about him or her?

Lord Shawcross was a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials following World War II.. While discussing the War Crimes Bill, which proposed to prosecute ex-Nazis living in Britain. He said, “You cannot do justice to the dead. When we talk about doing justice to the dead we are talking about retribution for the harm done to them. But retribution and justice are two different things.”

If the Government and the courts become indifferent to the suffering of the surviving family members of the deceased who has been murdered by someone who doesn’t care, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. In order for justice to prevail, the offender must being given a penalty that is severe enough that not only acts as a balm that sooths the agony of the murdered person’s loved ones, but also gives the rest of the community some feeling of justice because when an innocent person is murdered, the rest of us in the community suffer and part of our own psyche dies also.