I'm pretty sure they can't just decide to try a child as an adult. I think the DA has to request a trial to determine which court (adult or juvenile) will hear the case.
Just found out I was wrong 15 states allow the prosecutor to decide weather to file charges in criminal or juvenile court.
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A week later, NY Govenor Hugh Carey called the legislature back to Albany for a special session, passing the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978. Under its terms, kids as young as thirteen could be tried in adult court for murder and would face the same penalties. This law reversed the tradition of the past 150 years that children were malleable and could be rehabilitated and saved. There was now an attitude that there were truly bad kids and they should be locked away from society.
That's where it started as near as I could tell. Mostly because of a kid named Willie Bosket.
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Willie Bosket had committed over two thousand crimes in New York by the time he was fifteen, including stabbing several people. The son of a convicted murderer, he never knew his father but revered him for his "manly" crime. Just before he was sixteen, his crimes became more serious. Killing another boy in a fight, he then embarked upon a series of subway crimes, which ended up in the deaths of two men. He shot them, he later said, just to see what it was like. It didn't affect him. He knew the juvenile laws well enough to realize that he could continue to do what he was doing and yet still get released when he was twenty-one. He had no reason to stop.
There was also another earlier example of a child being sentenced as an adult.
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Jesse Pomeroy was fourteen when he was arrested in 1874 for the sadistic murder of a four-year-old boy. He was quickly dubbed "The Boston Boy Fiend." His rampage had begun three years earlier with the sexual torture of seven other boys. For those crimes Pomeroy was sentenced to reform school, but then he was released early. Not long afterward he mutilated and killed a 10-year-old girl who came into his mother's store. A month later, he snatched four-year-old Horace Mullen. He took Horace to a swamp outside town and slashed him so savagely with a knife that he nearly decapitated the child. Because of his strange appearance—he had a milky white eye---and his previous behavior, suspicion turned to him. When he was shown the body and asked if he'd done it, he responded with a nonchalant, "I suppose I did." Then the girl was found buried in his mother's cellar and he confessed to that murder, too. He was convicted and sentenced to death, although a public outcry against condemning a child to hang commuted the sentence to four decades of solitary confinement.
So apparently it's not really all that new.
And in these types of crimes I wonder if it's really excessive. I mean these are not 1st time offenders and willfully murdering another human being is a pretty serious crime.
What I find disturbing is the fact that more and more children are being tried as adults for non-violent offenses.
Fact Sheet: Florida's Experience with Trying Juveniles As Adults A 1991 study of two representative Florida counties showed that more than two-thirds (71%) of children transferred to adult court were charged with non-violent offenses (property, drug offenses or misdemeanors). Nearly a third (32%) of all the youth tried as adults in Florida had no prior convictions, and close to half (49%) had one or no-prior convictions. I blame alot of that on kneejerk reactions and career politicians wanting to look "tough" on crime.
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