Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
The YOA has provisions for people to be tried as an adult, depending on the circumstances, so I have no idea how these events would encourage abolishing it.
As someone who broke the occasional law as a kid, I would have been screwed up if I would have ended up in jail or with a criminal record that would have impacted my chances of getting a job out of school etc. It's not like I didn't have consequences, but they just didn't end up with me being in jail. I was a good kid, but made some bad choices from time to time as I was growing up.
I imagine there are many other people in that same situation.
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I agree with this to an extent, the yoa or whatever its called now, should be put in place to protect the type of kid that makes what I would think were obvious bad decisions, or where society or his parents fail the child.
However, my gut tells me to stop in this case, reading about this case churns my stomach. These three things were out to kill that night, its pretty clear to see. This wasn't the clerks resisting or fighting with the gun man. On the surveillance tape it sounds like these were executions for very little financial gain. This was as cold as you get, and as badly raised as anyone is, at the age of 13, you're cognizant enough to know that snuffing a persons life out is wrong. You don't need a parent or society to tell you that. Its the line that you don't cross, no matter what, and I'm of a mind that as soon as you cross that line its very difficult to go back, and also that the law should be applied to its maximum.
Now I have been wrong before, I remember being stunningly disturbed and upset when the young girl and her older boyfriend snuffed her parents and her brother out in Medicine Hat, and in my mind she was given a light juvenile sentence. But reading news reports on her, it sounds like she's worked very hard to change from the angry, disturbed kid that she was to holding down a job and going to university, and you hope that each night she feels a lot of remorse for what she did.
But she was an explosion of violence, whereas this kid sounds like he has a long history of it.
To be honest, I would be a lousy judge, because I doubt that in murder cases, I would want to hear or care about excuses. "I was hooked on drugs, I was beaten up by my dad, people called me names", in the case of violent crimes, the question in my mind would be "did you do it", and "were you defending yourself"