One such person is Elisa Poncz over at Children's Rights & Laws. She's in her 3rd year at Harvard Law School (so you know she's wicked smart!) and on Friday, she mused about the appropriateness of using, or potentially exploiting, youth rights to achieve desirable social changes.
In this case, there was a murder in Florida involving 3 teens. Two of them were 19 and one was 17, at the time of the crime -- a savage beating of a homeless man resulting in death. The prosecutor declined to seek the death penalty for the 19 year olds, (in the U.S., you can no longer execute people who were under 18 years old at the time of their crime) for reasons of proportionality between the sentences.
Assuming all three are equally guilty, all three should get the same punishment. That's Justice.
Now both Ms. Poncz and I are opposed to capital punishment, but something doesn't sit right with her, it seems, when youth rights are used as a proxy for achieving societal goals, even ones she agrees with. Money quote:
I'm concerned that the unique character of children might be exploited for the political gains of adults seeking rights that cannot be achieved in the broader society, but might be achieved with children (and then hopefully extended).That's a fair point. She goes on to wish that the prosecutor would have not sought the death penalty on moral, rather than age-related, grounds. I understand her concern. I would hate to see youth rights exploited to achieve some end I disagreed with. But in this case, I'm satisfied.
Call me a hypocrite -- ends justifying means in this case. What can I say? I'm not perfect. It's not that I disagree with Ms. Poncz, I'm just not going to get worked up about it in this case.
3 comments:
It strikes me that choosing not to seek execution because the perpetrator is a minor and then, by extension, choosing to forgo the death penalty for an accomplice who was of age on the grounds of equity in punishment are entirely moral grounds, not arbitrary ones.
I would say, though, that the notion that a person under the age of 18 should be treated differently from a person over the age of 18 is moral in theory but arbitrary in fact. There are 17-year-olds who, based on their life experience and maturity, are far more cognisant of the consequences of their actions than a 19-year-old accomplice. The underlying assumptions in exempting minors from certain punishments is that they are morally less developed and aware, and so less culpable, and that they will defer to an adult (i.e. someone over 18) when committing a crime. These assumptions are often false. There are 15 year-olds quite capable of being vile thugs and murderers, well aware of what they are doing. Society's reluctance to recognize this has, I suspect, more to do with a romanticized and infantilized notion of childhood than with reality.
As for the notion that "the unique character of children might be exploited for the political gains of adults seeking rights that cannot be achieved in the broader society, but might be achieved with children (and then hopefully extended)," we're already there. Take media pornography or violence, or guns, or Prince's funkyness. The appeal is always to "think of the children." Campaigners essentially wish to establish a broad right to be free 'from' X (which of course would curtail the rights of adults to be free "to" do X). And so they start with "the children," who as vulnerable, morally innocent beings (limited in agency of course) have undeniable emotional impact. Hard to argue with harm to the children. I don't mean to suggest that this kind of argument is entirely cynical, but it does involve a creeping infantilization of all our social policy debates.
One of the things I've been thinking about in the wake of the recent trans-fats ban in NYC, following, as it does on the heels of smoking bans in bars, etc. is how much do we, as a society, want the government to mandate our individual decisions based on the notion of what's healthiest for us?
Certainly, there's something to be said for trying to be one's healthiest, but mandating it with the force of law (and imprisonment) behind it strikes me as rather totalitarian.
I'm glad to see that there is such interest in the debate over children's issues and the legal status of kids in the U.S.
I agree with hasdai that a stark age line at age 18 seems arbitrary. That is an inherent problem with setting up any rule -- as opposed to a standard. It would be one thing if there were a test to figure out maturity and culpability levels, but there just isn't one. This being the case, we've settled on using age as a proxy -- even though the 18 "rule" will get it wrong sometimes. The Supreme Court agrees with that idea -- see Roper v. Simmons.
My concern with the elimination of the death penalty being used as the root cause of eliminating the death penalty for adults is that it ties the plight of children's law to adult law. In this way, if the adult death penalty were eliminated because the juvenile death penalty has been, then what happens to the juvenile death penalty when the adult penalty seems more attractive again? At that point, I'm concerned that the characteristics that made juveniles different in this instance will be ignored because of the equation of legal status with adults.
I'm just concerned that the strides made in Roper for youths -- in getting rid of the juvenile death penalty -- might be diminished by tying the fate of that argument to the adult death penalty.
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