Life Without Parole for 13-Year-Old Boys?

The Bible puts the age of accountability at thirteen. The Jews still Bar Mitzvah at thirteen, the age at which a boy is treated as a man. You have to draw the line somewhere, and this is as good as any. Just because some don’t grow up till they’re in their forties doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable.

Squiggy, children at that age, and much later even, don’t have fully developed brains. Hence they don’t think the same way adults do; their thought processes are different. In effect, they are temporarily insane at that age. As far as that line you speak of, States recognize full adulthood at age 21. This act of charging boys as men is done by prosecutors because judges allow it, not because it is the will of The People.

Squiggy

You also missed a very important point….it is usually only BOYS that are charged as adults. ADULT women are seldom held to this level of accountablity.

To Tonysprout: I wouldn’t say they are temporarily insane. That is very inaccurate description. That would be like saying the childs body is still developing, therefore they are temporarily physically disabled. Its more accurate to say they are developing toward adulthood, and their minds and bodies are becoming better equiped to handle the adult world. Each child is different in their growth. Experience is an important factor in producing a competant individual. If a child is coddled and sheltered from the unpleasant aspects of life, he may experience delayed adolescence and retain “childhood” well into his twenties. Likewise, the child who has lived a fuller life, with first hand experience in losing, winning, competing, engaging in complex social interactions with his peers,etc., will be better equiped for the day when he’s in control of his life. I’ve worked with juveniles in jail. The important thing about teen males is they don’t consider the future repurcussions of their actions. They live for RIGHT NOW. This enables them to partake in very dangerous risk taking because they just don’t consider getting hurt, caught, etc. Also, poor parenting at home with no punishment for their actions is a big factor for allowing any child to take the wrong path.

From (2) tonysprout:

“…States recognize full adulthood at age 21. …”

Yet another example of the excrutiatingly twisted maze of unintelligibility and injustice our body of law has become. If they are not considered adults, then they should not receive adult sentencing.

If a woman assaults a man in their home, then that fact alone, and not an assessment of who appears larger and more threatening, should dictate guilt and punishment.

If a puberescent girl gives oral sex to a puberescent boy, then either both are labeled sexual predators or neither.

If a man proves not, via DNA, to be the father of a child nor has signed any papers adopting that child, he should not be held liable for that child.

It is this twisted juggernaut of injustice that keeps me away from my coworkers at lunch lest I foam at the mouth and spit in their faces for the ignorance and apathy of the public that has allowed our government to do this.

There has always been a double standard between men( boys) and women(girls). They come down hard on men for certain crime, but pat the woman on the head for the same crime. Mary Winkler got 2 months in nut house for killing her husband and a man in Texas was executed for murdering his girlfriend. Both commited murder, but the woman was handled with kid gloves while the man was killed by the state for the very same thing.
It is time to go back to the constitution and start making women, who went around hollering” equal” for over 40 years,be held to the same harsh standard as men have always been held to! I think once you do that , the socially.legally and morally irresponsible behavior women have been getting away with, will stop.
Oh.. they are going to cry and say it’s not fair, but it is fair. Men will once again feel safe dealing with women. It will be safe for men to get married again. It may save the lives of some women too. A lot of women get killed because the man figures. What the hell, I am in trouble either way and if I kill her atleast she loses it all and no matter if the state terrorist kill me, she is already dead.

Boys and Girls, once they turn 18, are able to enlist in the military where they carry weapons, travel across the planet, and fight and die in foreign lands. This demonstrates that Youth itself is not a form of temporary insanity, that young teens just display a naivety about adult behavior and lack of experience in dealing with worldly problems. In our cushy, easy, First World society we have the luxory of allowing youths to live a delayed childhood. However, throughout most of history and in virtually all of the Third World, children take on adult roles much earlier than they do here. Once a girls starts having periods she is considered a woman. She is able at that point to conceive a child. Boys quit school and work at hard manual labor to support their extended family. Nature itself provided these things by having children become about 90 percent physically mature by the mid to late teen years. This makes sense when one considers that for most of history, and for much of the world currently, one’s lifespan ends in the 40′s to 50′s. I love America, but I do wish the people would have some knowledge of history and of the precarious circumstances that the majority of humans throughout the planet face day to day. My one criticism of Americans is that too many view life from our comfortable position and assume that the rest of the world lives in a relative paradise like ours.

shatteredmen, no question women are treated differently than men, and in most cases it’s completely wrong. Murder is murder and the perpetrator should fry, whatever sex they happen to be.

That being said, we shouldn’t lower the standards so that all are treated equally. America is lowering the standards in so many different categories we’re destroying ourselves. If your house catches on fire, I pray the firemen coming to save you are very large men with a lot of experience, not four foot seven girls who got in because of “affirmative action”.

The constitution says that all men are created equal, not that all outcomes are equal. Treating people equally (i.e. equal sentencing, equal pay for the same work, etc.) doesn’t mean throwing out common sense. And that’s the problem with lib/fems and their fellow travelers. To them, common sense is for dead white males.