With kid killers, American justice is criminal

BY KATE MASON

SHAWN CHENG/YH

On Fri., Mar. 9, we got a sneak preview. A single tear rolled down the cheek of 14-year-old murderer Lionel Tate as his sentence was read out in a Florida court room. Tate was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of first-degree murder as an adult. At age 12, he had attacked and killed six-year-old Tiffany Eurick with his bare hands in a move that his defense lawyers claimed was an imitation of a pro wrestling match he had watched on TV. The jury didn't buy that as an excuse, although it couldn't come up with a better one. No one knows why Tate did what he did, but it hardly matters now.

Years before he will be considered an adult in any other legal sense, Tate's life is over because Florida law wants to believe that only adults can do something as bad as what he did. Because he was tried as an adult, Tate, who was barely on the verge of puberty when he killed Eurick, will never know life as a free man. The world has already given up on him. Before he turns 18, he will be forgotten.

This is America's solution to youth violence: lock 'em up and throw away the key. Literally. In a flurry of hysteria over the power of children to be cruel, many states, particularly Florida and California, are enacting legislation that denies violent children the only defense that many of them have—their youth. Until recently, children under 18 had been tried as children. Juvenile courts would hear their cases and sentence them to time in juvenile prisons, where rehabilitation was the focus and early release the norm. The goal was to save these delinquents before it was too late, to prevent them from becoming criminals as adults, to acknowledge that children are not always aware of the gravity of their actions, and to recognize that children, by virtue of being children, could change. The point of the juvenile justice system was not only to punish criminals, but to help them.

We no longer want to be bothered with helping. Florida's law not only allows prosecutors to deny that children are children by declaring them adults in the eyes of the law, but it allows 14-year-olds like Tate to be sent into high-security adult prisons, where they will be nurtured through their adolescence by violent criminals three times their age and at least twice their size. Tate may not be beyond saving now, but he certainly would be after a few years in an adult prison. Fortunately, a judge recently approved his transfer to a juvenile prison until he reaches his 21st birthday. But she did not have to do that, and she may not in other like cases. Consider 15-year-old John Silva, who received life without parole for killing his 12-year-old cousin, or 14-year-old Nathaniel Brazil, who will be tried as an adult beginning Mon., Apr. 30 for killing his English teacher. Their acts were evil, terrible, and inexcusable. But they were acts committed by children who were deeply troubled for reasons no one has bothered to explore. And now no one ever will. Both boys live in Florida. Both will likely live in Florida prisons for the rest of their lives.

In San Diego, where students at Santana High School are still reeling from the murders committed by their classmate and where parents are still arguing about how bullying made sweet Andy Williams into a brutal murderer, prosecutors are quietly preparing to commit him to a fate similar to that of his counterparts in Florida. Under Proposition 21, a California initiative that states that juveniles charged with murder must stand trial as adults, Williams could receive a sentence of up to 500 years in prison for his act. In a few months the magazines will find something new to write about, the national argument over gun control will simmer down again, and Williams will begin the process of wallowing away his life in a prison. He will be forgotten to all but his friends and family and the friends and family of his victims. It is too late to save the victims. It may not have been too late to save Andy Williams. Now we will never know.

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