I find myself wondering about the killing itself. The boy is said to have used a .22 cal single bolt action rifle, in which he had to reload after each shot, literally put the bullet in the breech of the weapon. This takes time, and a .22 is not a “man-stopper.” There were two men. How was the boy able to effect this? Were they both sleeping? Where was the boy’s mother? If he were being abused, why did he not go seek help from her?

The main point here is that an 8-year-old should never be tried as an adult. Children do not approach adult levels of performance on many basic cognitive and motor skills until age 11 or 12. (Not that a child should be treated as an adult in the criminal justice system at age 12, as the issue of having a solid personality that can be determinative of his or her actions does not take place until late adolescence, at the earliest. For reference, see the works of Erik Erikson.) The most recent empirical evidence on the cognitive/motor development of children comes from the The NIH Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Study of Normal Brain Development, a longitudinal study began back in 1999.

An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday.

Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred. Psychologists say such abuse is often a factor in the extremely rare instances in which a small child murders a parent.

An investigation found no evidence that the boy had had disciplinary problems at school or shown signs that he was troubled, Chief Melnick said. “That’s what makes this case somewhat puzzling,” he said, adding that the court had ordered a psychological evaluation for the boy. “Our goal is to get him some help.”
…
“The wrinkle here,” Dr. Heide said, “is that this boy is so young, it could possibly be immaturity and impulsivity.” In children as young as 8, parts of the brain that weigh decisions and consequences are so underdeveloped that a child might not understand the finality of death.

The boy in Arizona was no stranger to weapons — his father, an avid hunter, reportedly trained his son to shoot prairie dogs — and psychologists said that might have played a role.

The shootings occurred Wednesday afternoon in the two-story home in St. Johns, about 200 miles northeast of Phoenix, where the boy lived with his father, Vincent Romero, 29. The deputy attorney for Apache County, Brad Carlyon, said Monday that the boy was taken to the police by his grandmother and initially considered a victim because he was believed to have discovered the men’s bodies.

But about 45 minutes into an hourlong police interview, Mr. Carlyon said, the boy confessed to shooting his father and a man who rented a room in the house, Timothy Romans, 39, of San Carlos, Ariz.

Mr. Carlyon said the boy told the police that he had been spanked at home the night before because he was having trouble at school. But, the prosecutor said, the boy “did not say that was the reason he committed any of the acts.”

Prosecutors said the murder weapon was a single-action .22-caliber hunting rifle that requires reloading before each shot. “He had to eject the shell from the rifle and put in a new shell each time he fired,” Mr. Carlyon said.

When I reflect on the many years that I practiced criminal law, the most emotionally exhausting cases I handled were in juvenile court. I was barely able to suppress my frustration and desire to rage against a machine that all too often decided that the best interests of the child mandated finding the child guilty despite a lack of proof because he or she could profit from the unique child-centered “help” that the probation officers would provide. Sometimes the probation officers did help, but a lot of times — especially with troubled and confused kids (a condition often caused by their parents) — they exacerbated the problems. I remember representing a runaway 14-year-old girl whose father, a tough-love devotee, had kicked her out of the home. She broke into the house one morning after he left for work so that she could raid the refrigerator, shower, and change clothes. She was charged with burglary and I almost lost it when, as we entered the courtroom, the prosecutor whispered the following words that forever shall live in infamy; to wit, “But, we have to teach these fucking little criminals to be accountable.”

Yikes, them’s fighting words! Don’t you be saying that around me!

Despite quite a few similar cases, however, I had far more room to maneuver to minimize the impact of the system on “my kids,” as I affectionately called my clients.

No matter how tough and street wise they presented themselves to be to the outside world and to me when I first met them in detention, the walls came crumbling down revealing the frightened and extremely vulnerable child inside when at last they realized that I did not judge them and actually cared about what happened to them.

Much later, I handled quite a few death-penalty cases. They took a toll on me too, which is why I went into teaching, but children always will be children to me and it’s awful to see what terrible damage can be inflicted on a child by a supposedly well-intentioned do-gooder just trying to dispense some tough love in the name of teaching them accountability.

Troubled kids can be a real pain in the you-know-what when they challenge authority, refuse to go to school, and take-off for days at a time. My advice to all you parents out there trying to deal with such a child is to stick with them and show them that come Hell or high water, you love them and will be there for them no matter what they do because more than anything else they need to know that while their parent may disapprove of certain things they do, their parent will always always accept and love them.

And yep, what you laid out was close to the structure here until maybe 1995 or so when they started getting ”tougher on juvenile crime”. Things sure worked better when the state, defense and the court all had more unfettered by mandate discretion to just do the right thing; the crap is screwed up now.

As you noted, there were certain age cut-offs where presumptions regarding the kid’s capacity to form criminal intent were operational. Sixteen and 17 were presumed yes, rebuttable. 12 through 15 no presumption, but the prosecutor still had the burden of proving it. 10 and 11 were presumed no, but rebuttable. Under 10 was conclusively presumed no.

Finally, the Juvenile Court could extend jurisdiction to age 21, if it acted before the kid’s 18th birthday when juvenile court jurisdiction automatically expired.

I believe the law was later changed requiring murder charges to be filed in adult court if the defendant was 16 or older.

Like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey while blindfolded, responsibility for the result creating liability or the crime is placed on the actor who proximately caused it. Although the actor’s mental state is considered in criminal law to assess the seriousness of the crime (e.g., murder or manslaughter), with the exception of acting in self defense or defense of another, most of the rest of the web-like factors to the extent identified are relegated to being considered as mitigation of punishment rather than responsibility. Non-linear and web-like causation factors consisting of events that happened however long ago; events that didn’t happen that might have produced a different outcome, if they had happened; events that did not happen, but were perceived to have happened all fade into an indistinct and grayish-brown tapestry ignored or dismissed as irrelevant.

Yet, are we not the product of all of these web-like influences and isn’t our perception as well shaped by them? Should we be so eager and quick to pin the responsibility tail on one person instead of the web that produced him?

These are tough but not new questions. They’ve been asked for centuries and the number of people asking these questions and the passion with which they demand answers will be most evident when the defendant identified by the linear-responsibility model is an eight-year-old child.