Piling Up Those Cases For Redemption
Two teenagers aged 14 and 18 were released on bail last night after being questioned about the murder of Rhys Jones, the schoolboy who was shot dead in a pub car park by a gunman on a BMX bicycle.
Right there, we have something of a problem with characterization: an 18 year old is chronologically a “teenager”, true. (So is a 19 year old.) But legally, he is an adult. Or has that changed?
The 11-year-old had cut across the car park while on his way home from a youth team practice match in an adjoining park when he was shot in the neck, apparently at random, at about 7.30pm on Wednesday by a hooded teenager. Rhys is the youngest person to be shot dead in Merseyside.
One witness said the killer had coolly held his weapon, a large handgun, steady with two hands while firing three shots at his victim before riding off…
That’s where we are in this world now. Apparently, some children carry firearms while riding bicycles. It seems that if the Independent is still in business 5 years from now, it already has been presented with another “case for redemption“.
…Last night, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith appeared close to tears after watching the boy’s parents talk of their grief at a press conference. She said she felt “terrible” about the death, and a sense of responsibility in its wake. Earlier, she told Channel 4 News: “I am willing to consider anything that will help us to get the information to put people away.”…
Ms Smith’s response is emotional, but utterly legally unrealistic. If the killer turns out to have been younger than age 16, as we know he is unlikely to be put away for all that long. We know why, of course: the assumption is always that children are not punished; they are to be reformed.
That includes reformed post-murder conviction, even if murder is a crime that is never repaid by “time served”, but is rather a crime against forever. It isn’t shoplifting, burglary, or car theft. So, unless the killer turns out to be of an age in which he can be dealt with as an adult, with this murder we appear back to the debate of what to do with children who kill.
However, we have boxed ourselves in. Given the legal framework under which we function (if “function” is the right word), children under no circumstances should be permitted even to have the chance to kill; yet as adults, we have abdicated our responsibilities, and given them way too much adult-style freedom to have the opportunity to do so. We’ve put guns in children’s hands (literally), and then turned our backs; but one simply cannot have adult freedoms without having to assume adult responsibilities.
Thus we wait, weirdly hoping that when arrested the killer was a legal adult on a BMX bicycle. If so, at least he might then actually face adult jail time.
And that’s why, also, any idea of lowering the voting age is rank absurd — unless there is a commensurate lowering of the age of all adult responsibility. For we are told children must be extra-protected, because they are never deemed fully responsible. But it is plainly ludicrous to talk of children’s rights therefore as being of the same order as those of adults, because as children they do not face adult sanctions for misbehavior. Not even for murder.
Nice going — we’ve set up the utter worst of worlds. What’s the solution? Since it appears we cannot legally enforce “childhood” any longer in order to protect both them and ourselves (because children have “rights”), it seems that unless the age of criminal responsibility is reduced to about, say, age 7, and we give 7 year olds the vote, there is probably little that can be done. The BBC reports:
…Detectives believe the murderer could be as young as 13…
We are reaping the whirlwind. We have among us now children as capable of murder as any 18 year old or 25 year old. And we are legally paralyzed, unable to do a blessed thing to rein them in.
Wait’ll we see the youthful Einstein they pick up for this eventually. “Why’d you do it, son!?” “Uhh, like, huh. I dunno.” And, chances are, he won’t even be deportable either.
