Justices Weigh Life In Prison For Youths Who Never Killed | Hacker News Reader

Justices Weigh Life In Prison For Youths Who Never Killed

nytimes.com

11 pointsojbyrne12 comments

I think part of the problem (and there are many) is that life sentences don't always mean life in prison and shorter sentences don't always mean what they say either. When you can sentence someone to 40 years and they get out in 10, if you really want them in for 40 years, you almost have to sentence them for life. I'm not saying this is exactly how it works, but some of this is almost certainly at play.

I have no problem with life sentences for non-homicidal crimes. If someone rapes 50 people at knife point, they should go to jail for life. The possibility of rehabilitation is irrelevant at that point. The right to liberty can be forfeited just like any other right. If you commit certain crimes, you can lose your right to vote or to bear arms. I think this extends to the right to liberty as well.

The whole issue of rehabilitation is up for debate. That a murderer won't do it again doesn't undo what they did. If someone steals $1000 from you, you're still out $1000 whether it's the last time they steal or not. I think the main goal of punishment, where applicable, should be restitution. If you steal someone's car, you should be forced to pay them back for it, and then punitive damages should be assessed on top of that as a deterrent from future crime, because if you steal 1000 cars and get caught for only 999 of them, you shouldn't come out ahead.

In crimes where restitution is not possible (rape and murder are the obvious examples), outright punishment (for no one's benefit except future potential victims) is warranted in my mind. The law can only reasonably be maintained with a threat of negative consequences which fit the crime. A $100 fine would not be a reasonable deterrent for murder because it doesn't fit the crime. Murder rates would certainly rise if that were the punishment. A threat of course is meaningless if not followed though on, so the punishment for crimes which cannot be repaid must be harsh enough to serve as a deterrent and enforced regularly enough to continue to deter. Life in prison does not constitute as strong a deterrent if the criminal knows it won't be enforced. The death penalty in every state but Texas probably constitutes no additional deterrent at all given how rarely it's enforced.

To me, non-enforced laws are a serious problem. They send the message that we're not really serious about this whole law thing. This is why people get so upset when they get speeding tickets, because the law is presented as a joke. There is no serious attempt to prevent speeding, yet you can still get a ticket for it. This is a problem.

It is vital that laws for more serious crimes are not presented in as flippant a manner.

The question is basically what constitutes a punishment which sufficiently fits the crime to serve as a deterrent. If a life sentence is necessary to meet this condition for murder by adults, what changes with teenagers?

EDIT: I want to add an important distinction here. There are two separate things I am saying here. A punishment should fit the crime, and a punishment should serve as a deterrent. The punishment is just because it fits the crime. It is executed at all because it is a deterrent. The fitting of punishment to crime is the justification of punishment. The deterrence is the reason for punishment. These are separate issues entirely. If it was impossible to change crime rates regardless how you punished crime, there would be no reason to punish crime at all, even if it was just to do so. Similarly if killing people for theft prevented all theft (thus serving as a perfect deterrent), it wouldn't be just simply because there was a reason to do it.

I think the correct way to assess how children and adults (older teenagers being counted as adults) should be sentenced differently is by considering the difference in the crime, not the difference in the person. If a six-year old kid shoots and kills someone, their crime is not the same as if a 36-year old does it. The intent is part of the crime, and a six-year old's intent cannot possibly be the same as that of a 36-year old, simply due to their lack of understand of guns and life and death.

That said, I don't think the point of sentencing children differently is that children can be rehabilitated.

Rehabilitation only addresses the issue of prevention of further crime by the same person, which is not the entire issue. Part of the issue is maintaining the force of the law as a deterrent to all future potential criminals. But you shouldn't read this as saying that a criminal is paying not for his own crimes but for those of others. The "payment" for murder cannot be made by anyone.

There are many reasons not to use the death penalty. Enough to convince me that it should only be used in cases of especially heinous or repeat offenses. Nevertheless, I think that if you intentionally kill someone, your right to life is essentially forfeited. Life imprisonment is a concession to the vast number of imperfections in the death penalty (not the least of which is the possibility of sentencing innocent people), not a statement that the criminal deserves to continue living.

Also please understand that I am talking about deliberate, premeditated murder here. If someone in a drunken bar fight intends to punch someone in the face and accidentally kills them, they should be punished differently, not because we expect they won't do it again, but because their crime is fundamentally different. (Of course this brings up an entirely separate issue. If being in a drunken bar fight means you might end up killing someone, then being in a drunken bar fight constitutes endangerment to the lives of the people you are fighting, which is a completely separate crime from the actual fight or the results thereof. There is, however, very little punishment for endangerment in the U.S., which is understandable given how difficult it is to pin down.)

The problem here is capacity. Whether minors are involved in a homicide or not, the legal system has typically said that people under the age of 18 lack the mental capacity to be involved in certain activities (i.e. contracts, voting rights, juvenile as opposed to adult offenses, etc.). The courts have made a distinction and thus believe that minors are different mentally. This is not dissimilar from an insanity defense against a murder charge. The courts have said that mental capacity matters, and minors are not equal to adults.

And that's where this article upsets me, because in the cases mentioned in this article and other "tried as adults" cases, the court makes an exception, which to me doesn't follow logic or the way the courts, and statutes have typically distinguished things.

Life sentences for children, especially when there isn't a homicide, just isn't right.

Seems like the right decision under these circumstances:

> Mr. Sullivan, 34, had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary in 1989 in Pensacola.

String of crimes including raping an elderly woman? Probably just better off locking up people like that forever. Heck, if even 1 out of 10 of them repeated if let out at age 40, what a horrible mess for no good cause. String of crimes including violently abusing an elderly woman? Yeah, that pretty much forfeits all claims on your sovereignty and freedom.

> Mr. Graham, 22, was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for a 2003 robbery of a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating probation by committing a home invasion robbery when he was 17.

Repeated violent crime, followed by more crime on probation? Again, what's the downside of locking him up forever? That it might be nicer or more proper to let him go after a long time, let him back into society with no skills or acclimation to the outside world? In days before society had resources to imprison people, both of those violent criminals almost certainly would've been executed and society would've moved on.

Now, I'm against the death penalty typically outside of states of emergency, because executing even one innocent man is a terrible thing. But if someone's repeatedly hurting people from a very young age, it doesn't seem like there's any gain to letting them loose after 20 years, and potentially a heck of a lot of bad that could happen.

Just to be clear, Mr. Sullivan was 13 years old. In most of the world (apparently not Florida) that's an age where there's at least some questions about you being responsible for your own actions.

> Just to be clear, Mr. Sullivan was 13 years old. In most of the world (apparently not Florida) that's an age where there's at least some questions about you being responsible for your own actions.

He raped an elderly woman - regardless of any questions about whether he should be responsible for that in a philosophical sense, don't you think it'd be incredibly reckless to let him back into society?

I think that is up to psychiatrists decide, judges don't have the proper education to determine whether or not Mr. Sullivan is dangerous.

I think it's incredibly reckless to write him off at 13 years old. There's plenty of examples out there of people who committed horrendous crimes as teenagers, paid appropriately for their mistakes, and went on to productive lives.

> I think it's incredibly reckless to write him off at 13 years old.

Serious question - what percent of repeat offenders would be acceptable to you? Because if 95% of the extremely brutal, violent people we lock up forever could've been rehabilitated, but the other 5% would've raped/murdered/assaulted/brutalized someone innocent, that seems like a tradeoff worth making. If you let extremely violent criminals go, some of them will repeat. I'm okay locking up someone who does such heinous thing forever, and I don't feel that's reckless.

Put this way - if one elderly woman isn't violently raped by a repeat offender, and 99 violent criminals spend their lives behind bars who could've been rehabilitated, that's a fine tradeoff to me. So in such a horrific incidence, I'm not okay with a repeat rate of 1%. You?

I don't want to be a complete turd, but you haven't given any examples of such people -- or even really made an argument that whatever examples you would have given are a significant proportion. I can think of a few, and in all but one case, their "conversion" is rather suspect. Or "horrendous" means some form of not-so-violent larceny (e.g. about as far as brandishing a weapon to intimidate) -- not rape or violent assault.

One uncomfortable thing you have to face in life is that some people are worth significantly less than others. I'd rather save an animal at the shelter than save the examples of utter trash the article mentions. There are billions of people on the planet, you're not going to miss these bits of broken humanity (and no, I don't particularly care about their families).

Would you really trust some of these people you talk about in the abstract? It's one thing to say that you read about Joe Thug turning his life around in Salon. It's quite another to trust your life around this person.

I know the crime is pretty terrible, but we really don't know the whole story. Mr. Sullivan might have been raped daily by a crazy uncle. He might have had crack put in his baby formula. He really might have been subject to all kinds of terrible abuse - you just don't know.

This is why law is complicated, why we have trials, and judges, court psychologists, social workers and other professionals whose job it is to figure out what to do with kids like this.

I really wanted to comment because I work very closely with the NYC Juvenile Crimes division - I actually built their case management database and work with their prosecutors almost daily. You rarely hear the whole story, especially in these unusual types of cases, so it's best to leave it to the professionals.

I've learned that the answer to every question in law (and actually in engineering too) is always "it depends".

In olden times they would hang or severely flog such people. I have no idea what is best, but in some instances you are essentially dealing with broken specimens of humanity. Maybe a good lobotomy would be best. They could ask me whether I prefer plastic or paper.

I prefer plastic.

As much as I agree that such people are "inhuman", and my first instinct (like many, if not most, other people, I'd imagine) is that these people don't deserve to be treated like 'normal' people... they do deserve it. If you act in a violent way against someone who is not actively dangerous (e.g. waving a weapon around), you're not better than they are. We have laws for a reason, and this guy probably should spend the rest of his life in jail, but doing physical harm to him just brings you down to his level. When it's done by our government (e.g. capital punishment), it's just making us all responsible.

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