Growing up behind bars (Jailed for murder at 13)

[flamingyouth]

Willard Jimerson Jr. hadn't made it out of seventh grade when he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for shooting a 14-year-old girl in the back.

Barely 5 feet tall and, at 13, one of the youngest people in state history to stand trial as an adult, Jimerson sat, his feet dangling beneath the defense table, as he listened to testimony about that night -- how he had watched Jamie Lynn Wilson flee a gang of schoolmates and fall to the sidewalk; how he pulled out a gun and fired it as she begged for help.

Locked away since 1994, Jimerson, now 25, remains frozen in early adolescence. He has never driven a car, used e-mail or balanced a checkbook. Though he married last year -- to the sister of a fellow inmate -- the two have never been intimate, because conjugal visits are not permitted for prisoners who wed while locked up. But for those who enter as children, Jimerson believes, the rule is absurd.

Recent research on the developing brains of young people has led some legal experts to question the tough stand taken toward children such as Jimerson during the 1990s, when conscienceless youth seemed to be killing just for the thrill of it. But cases like his continue to crop up on court dockets.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/266548_jimerson13.html

[Warpy]

1. The problem becomes what to do about psychopaths

who are brought up without the social controls that keep wealthy psychopaths in line enough to head corporations. There are kids in their early teens who utterly lack empathy and the capacity for remorse. No, they're not adults and trying them as such is cruel and lunatic. However, how can we incarcerate them in juvenile facilities designed for truants? What do we do when they reach their twenty first birthday?

A sane country would have started studying these kids and kept them in facilities designed to deal with psychopaths, to teach them adequate social controls that they don't end up lifelong predators.

Oh yeah, forget that, conservatives run both parties.

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. I cannot imagine the intellectual consistency in defining someone

13, 14 or 15 as an adult; or probably 16 or 17 as an adult fully capable of acting on informed consent.

If an adult had sexual relations with someone that young they could likely faces several years in prison based on the view that someone so young is not capable of meaningful consent.

If a person is too young to consent for sex; too young to consent for alcohol or any legal contract, too young to drop out of school, too young to drive; how could they possibly be deemed by the authorities as old enough to be held accountable as an adult in committing a serious felony?