https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/opinion/sunday/murder-14-year-old-adult.html

The three teenagers charged in Ms. Majors’s killing are just 13 and 14 years old, a second tragedy.

The two 14-year-olds, Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis, have been charged with second-degree murder as adults.

If Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis are convicted, they could face a minimum sentence of seven and a half and five years in prison, respectively, and up to life in prison.

Legislators should overturn the 1978 law, and rethink what justice can look like for young people like Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis. The state can use family courts to base criminal justice for adolescents around rehabilitation instead of punishment, even in cases of murder. No one under the age of 18 should face charges as an adult.

And here's the full thing for bonus hilarity:

Even 14-Year-Olds Who Kill Are Not Adults

If the young teens accused in Tessa Majors’s murder are convicted, a 1978 law could deny them a chance at redemption.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old Barnard College freshman with green hair, loved music, especially punk rock, and singing with her band.

On Dec. 11, while she was walking in Morningside Park in Manhattan, she was stabbed to death, apparently during a robbery.

The three teenagers charged in Ms. Majors’s killing are just 13 and 14 years old, a second tragedy.

The two 14-year-olds, Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis, have been charged with second-degree murder as adults.

Prosecutors say Rashaun stabbed Ms. Majors as Luchiano restrained her. Lawyers at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, which is representing Rashaun, offered an obvious, yet necessary, observation in a statement Wednesday: “Our client is a 14-year-old child,” they wrote.

Under New York law, children as young as 13 are automatically tried as adults if charged with second-degree murder and certain felony sex crimes. So are 14- and 15-year-olds charged with a long list of other violent offenses, including rape, robbery, assault in the first degree and arson.

That isn’t unusual in the United States, where nearly all states have laws allowing minors under 18, some as young as 10, to be tried as adults in certain circumstances. The country has always allowed these prosecutions in some cases. But in the “tough on crime” era of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, the practice exploded, with states adopting sweeping laws that made it easier to prosecute those under the age of 18 as adults.

New York was a leader in the incarceration of children. It began prosecuting young adolescents as adults under a draconian law passed in 1978, in the aftermath of the Willie Bosket case. Mr. Bosket was a 15-year-old black boy who fatally shot two men and wounded a third on the subway. He was sentenced to five years in a juvenile facility under the law at time. The city’s tabloids responded with outrage over the sentence. Under pressure and facing re-election, Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat who had once supported criminal justice reforms, reversed course, campaigning hard for legislation that would rebrand him as tough on crime. The result was the law, still on the books, mandating the prosecution as adults of children as young as 13 when they’re charged with certain violent crimes.

(Mr. Bosket, now 57, has been incarcerated for all but two years since the age of 9. He will be eligible for parole in 2062, having been convicted of numerous charges including assaulting correction officers. In 2008, when he had been in solitary confinement for two decades, he told The Times, “If somebody came to me with a lethal injection, I’d take it.”)

Thousands of adolescents have been tried as adults in New York. From 2014 to 2018 alone, nearly 1,800 children ages 13 to 15 were charged as adults, according to data compiled by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. Among the children prosecuted as adults in New York over the years was Korey Wise, one of the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the rape and assault of a woman jogging in Central Park in 1989. Mr. Wise, 16 at the time of his arrest, served about 13 years in prison before he was exonerated.

Adolescents tried in adult court are without important protections offered to children in family court. Children tried as adults often receive longer sentences, farther from home, and face mandatory sentencing minimums that would not apply in family courts.

Family court judges also have more resources at their disposal to address the complex needs of these children, and can focus on rehabilitation rather than just punishment.

The problems with trying children as adults, let along incarcerating them well into adulthood, are many. The research on the matter is overwhelming. It shows that adolescent brains are different than those of adults, making adolescents less likely to exercise impulse control, assess risk or consider long-term consequences. Younger offenders are more likely to suffer from mental illness than their peers. Many are readily capable of being rehabilitated. There is also evidence that trying children as adults may make society more dangerous. One study, for instance, found that adolescents tried in adult court were 34 percent more likely to be rearrested than those tried in the juvenile justice system. Another found that those incarcerated as adolescents had poorer physical and mental health as adults.

This is why many countries approach justice for minors differently. Spain, Germany, Greece, Switzerland and Italy do not allow any adult prosecutions of children under 18, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice, which supports ending the adult prosecution of minors.

It wasn’t until 2005 that the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of young people who committed murder before they turned 18. In 2012, it banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for those who committed crimes when they were 17 or younger.

But the United States still has one of the highest juvenile incarceration rates in the industrialized world. Nearly 50,000 adolescents under 18 were in detention or correctional facilities in 2015. Black children made up 44 percent of those under 18 who were incarcerated that year, though they comprised 16 percent of the American population under 18. This bleak reality is grimly unsurprising in the United States, a country that has relied on brutality and prison to control large portions of its citizens from the days of slavery to the era of mass incarceration.

With the 1978 law, New York embraced this tradition, even before the “War on Crime” policies of the 1980s and ’90s sent incarceration rates soaring.

New York has come a long way since then. In 2008, the number of children 15 or under who served time in detention facilities was 9,269. By 2017, it had declined to 3,654. The trend tracks with steep declines in incarceration over all in New York. The city’s jail population, for example, which peaked at roughly 22,000 in the early 1990s, is now 5,376.

New York’s Raise the Age legislation, signed into law in 2017, required that 16- and 17-year-olds charged with most misdemeanors be tried in family court. The reforms also gave prosecutors and judges the discretion to remove most felony cases against 16- and 17-year-olds to family court, where judges can place adolescents in custody for as long as six years in felony cases. Minors still serving a sentence at 21 serve the remainder in an adult facility.

But the Raise the Age legislation didn’t roll back the so-called Willie Bosket Law, and end the practice of charging 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds as adults for serious violent felony charges. If Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis are convicted, they could face a minimum sentence of seven and a half and five years in prison, respectively, and up to life in prison.

New York’s police commissioner, Dermot Shea, said of Rashaun Weaver’s arrest, “Sadly, it cannot bring back this young woman, this student, this victim.”

Commissioner Shea was right. Locking up Rashaun and Luchiano for life won’t bring Tessa Majors back.

This is one more area where New York can reimagine its criminal justice system, breaking with its past as a leader in locking Americans up and throwing away the key to instead become a national model of reform.

Legislators should overturn the 1978 law, and rethink what justice can look like for young people like Rashaun Weaver and Luchiano Lewis. The state can use family courts to base criminal justice for adolescents around rehabilitation instead of punishment, even in cases of murder. No one under the age of 18 should face charges as an adult.

Crimes like the Tessa Majors killing test the limits of forgiveness and redemption. But charging adolescents as adults makes the state crueler, not safer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638308)

"haha....look guys! I am Russian! haha....i talk about Russia! It is very cool and 'badass' as they say to talk about Russian things no? Haha...if only you knew about Russia...is super interesting place"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39640436)

IF I SAW YOU IN HEAVEN

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638426)

The one case study they mention (the guy who brought about the change in law) seems to hurt their point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638548)

So? Isn't that just because despite being 16% of the population, they commit 44% of the crimes?

I assume male children are like 95% of the incarcerated children despite being only 50% of the American child population. Do libs have a problem with that too?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638612)

Women murder their husbands, children, work enemies, et al much more often than any statistics reflect, via methods easy to chalk up to “accidents” or “random tragedies”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638642)

This is what we are up against. These people (the far-far-left) not only need to be beaten this November, they need to be humiliated McGovern style.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39638836)

Were they tried in adult court because they were bigger shitheads in the first place? Probably!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39639078)

the same lack of future-time orientation that leads to criminality in the first place makes months or years of jail inconceivable and unreal, but getting your ass beat in public for everyone to see is visceral

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39639131)

they face life in prison

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39639870)

The options should be as follows: If you cop a plea to guilty, then you can have life in prison without the possibility of parole. If you plead not guilty, and a jury returns a verdict of guilty, then you will dangle from the hangman's noose. But NY justice is so broken that the death penalty isn't even an option, nor is the threat of it available to extract a plea bargain.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39639949)

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-aoc-tessa-majors-20200222-s7gurefgsre4nbj2om27nzzjua-story.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39639891)

Unfortunately, more normal, sane people will be killed too, which is the real problem.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4451410&forum_id=2#39643222)