Supreme Court to Decide on Life Imprisonment for Juveniles

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the issue of whether juvenile offenders can be sentenced to life prison terms. The case that will go before the Supreme Court concerns a 13-year-old Florida boy who, in 1989, was convicted of assaulting and raping a 72-year-old Florida woman. The convict, Joe Sullivan, had a string of 17 other offenses including assault, animal cruelty, and burglaries.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that a death sentence for juvenile was unconstitutional in the 2005 case of Roper Vs. Simmons. Child advocates say that young offenders change too much for the legal system to make a summary judgment in the case of juveniles.

I've always believed that a person should "put their money where their mouth is," to use that time-honored expression. If I believe that "young adults today need help," then it behooves me to devote some of my time to them, which I have also done. In doing so, my choice of action was ordinary rather than exceptional, and there were hundreds of times I'd rather have been somewhere else, doing something else.

There are too many abandoned kids, too many horrific stories, too many young lives wasted. Social work is an occupation not at all romantic and it can grind you down and hurt you in ways you least expect. There are also lessons to be learned. The first lesson is that you can't win them all. You're going to lose sometimes, and you'd better get used to it, learn how to deal with it.

Most of my experience with young adults has been through teaching in an "alternative school" and with my affiliations with boxing. The term "alternative school" is a generic one; the school where I worked was for young adults between the ages of fourteen to twenty-one. My "student body" consisted of young people who had been kicked out of regular schools for fighting, drugs, street crime, general thuggery, anti-social behavior of a variety of sorts. I never was the sort of person who tried to "save the world" but I am grateful that a few compassionate adults intervened at the right time of my own youth, and I had a karmic debt to repay.

The second lesson to be learned is you can't judge a kid on appearance and presentation. The best and brightest students are capable of the most extreme acts. When you look back, you wonder why you didn't notice those very subtle cues which might have served as a warning sign. Good grades, good looks, positive personality traits were not in themselves a basis from which you could draw a conclusion. Think Ted Bundy. One of my best and brightest students was a direct accomplice to murder, and after the murder, burned the victim in a roadside funeral pyre. The bright idea for that killing sprang from a love and drugs tangle.

In boxing, one of my best young boxers, a very bright, strong, and personable kid with great academic and athletic potential murdered another young man in the course of a robbery, choking him to death in a parking lot on a cold winter night. That killing was gang related; the young man in question, weak-willed, had allowed himself to be sucked in by an older neighborhood gang hero, who was jailed along with him.

I don't want to convey the impression that contact with boxing puts you in contact with gangsters. To be honest, the few real gangsters who've come into the boxing gym for a workout don't last long because they don't like the work. When they do infrequently come in, we don't preach, we put them right to work. The hard work and serious nature of a real boxing gym will either pull them off the streets or we won't see them again, more often the latter.

There was another adolescent I know who, at fourteen, was already a practiced criminal and had stolen things ranging from loaded handguns to designer jeans. "Little Chucky" provided plenty of clues; he'd told me straight out he was going straight for the gangsta' life and he made good on his word. He's now fifteen and in jail for shooting someone at a party, though the victim is still alive.

All things considered, the young adolescents with whom I've been acquainted are worth the time of day. Though they are somewhat dangerous children, and nearly always volatile, most of them deserve a chance and only a few are going to get one. What they mostly get is half-hearted social work by people who are more comfortable in cubicles than American streets.

It's hard to argue against the advocacy concept, but I would say that most people have never met young people who have little inhibition against killing you in any circumstances, let alone the right circumstances. The young and troubled adolescents with whom I've come in contact, even the ones who committed murder, were not the worst or most hardened criminals in the world. Yet, with the worst of them, there is a trail of dead people behind.

In extreme cases, the states have the larger duty to protect innocent citizens from mortal harm even when that involves the sacrifice of otherwise worthy humanitarian ideals.

I don't like it much, either, but that's the way it is. The U.S. Supreme Court should know this. I'm not making this up.

Sources: Wall Street Journal Online at :

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125469908713662969.html#articleTabs%3Darticle