Teen to be tried as juvenile for killing

NEW CASTLE, Pa., Aug. 24 (UPI) -- A Pennsylvania teenager charged with shooting his father's fiancee when he was 11, killing her and her unborn child, will be tried as a juvenile, a judge said.
Common Pleas Judge Dominick Motto reversed a decision he made last year that Jordan Brown, now 13, should be tried as an adult, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. An appellate panel ruled this year a juvenile cannot be forced into an adult trial simply for not admitting the crime.
Jordan will now go before a judge instead of a jury. If convicted, he can be sentenced only to a juvenile facility and must be released at 21, while an adult conviction for murder would have carried a sentence of life with no parole.
Kenzie Houk, 26, of New Beaver, was killed with a 20-guage shotgun. Prosecutors argued Jordan planned the crime with a certain amount of sophistication, while defense lawyers pointed to his lack of a violent history as a sign he could be rehabilitated.
Defense lawyer Dennis Elisco called the decision "a relief."
"It's long overdue and clearly the correct result," he said.

Advocates for Abandoned Adolescents - Our Mission is to do better!

Locked Away Forever

Almost 10,000 Americans are serving life sentences for crimes
they committed before they turned 18.

By Adam Liptak

One night when she was just 15, Rebecca Falcon got drunk and made the decision that derailed her life. Now, she is serving a life sentence without parole at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Fla. Looking back, Falcon faults her choice of friends. "I was like a magnet for the wrong crowd," she says. At the time, Falcon was living with her grandmother in Panama City, Fla. On Nov. 19, 1997, upset over an ex-boyfriend, she downed a large amount of whiskey and hailed a cab with an 18-year-old friend. He had a gun and, within minutes, the cab driver was shot in the head. The driver, Richard Todd Phillips, 25, died several days later. Each of the teenagers later said the other had done the shooting.
Falcon's jury found her guilty of murder, though it never did sort out precisely what happened. "It broke my heart," says Steven Sharp, the jury's foreman. "As tough as it is, based on the crime, I think it's appropriate. It's terrible to put a 15-year-old behind bars forever."
The U.S. is one of the few countries that does that. About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before age 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole. Life without parole is available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries, but a recent report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found only 12 juveniles—in Israel, South Africa, and Tanzania—serving such sentences. In the U.S., more than 2,200 people are serving life without parole for crimes they committed before turning 18. More than 350 are 15 or younger.
Cruel & Unusual?
Juvenile criminals are serving life terms (with or without the possibility of parole) in at least 48 states, according to a survey by The New York Times, and their numbers have increased sharply in the past decade. Of those imprisoned in 2001, 95 percent were male and 55 percent were black.
Is such punishment fair for juvenile offenders? In March 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18 violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments." That might have surprised the people who ratified the Amendment in 1791, many of whom found such executions neither cruel nor unusual. But the Court said that the meaning of the Amendment changes with "evolving standards of decency." Their decision has convinced prosecutors and activists that the next legal battleground in the U.S. will be over life sentences for juveniles.
'Unformed' Personalities
The Supreme Court ruled that youths under 18 who commit terrible crimes are less blameworthy than adults, at least for purposes of the death penalty: They are less mature, more susceptible to peer pressure, and their personalities are unformed. "Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy concluded, is not "evidence of irretrievably depraved character."
Most of those youthful qualities were evident in Falcon, who had trouble fitting in at school. She is in prison for felony murder, meaning she participated in a crime that led to a killing but was not proved to have killed anyone.
Jim Appleman, Falcon's prosecutor, says she does not ever deserve to be free. He is convinced that she shot Phillips. "If she were a 29-year-old or a 22-year-old," he says, "I have no doubt she would have gotten the death penalty."
Although Falcon believes her sentence is unfair, she says her eight years in prison have changed her. "A certain amount of time being incarcerated was what I needed," she says. "But the law I fell under is for people who have no hope of being rehabilitated, that are just career criminals and habitually break the law, and there's just no hope for them in society. I'm a completely different case."
'This can be hard'
The case of another Florida teenager, Timothy Kane, shows how youths can be sent away for life, even when they were not central figures in a crime. (Florida is among the states with the most juvenile offenders—about 600—serving life sentences, about 270 without parole.)
On Jan. 26, 1992, Kane, then 14, was playing video games at a friend's house in Hudson, Fla., while some older boys planned a burglary. That night, five youths rode their bikes over to a neighbor's home. Two backed out, but Kane followed Alvin Morton, 19, and Bobby Garner, 17, into the house. He did not want to be called a scaredy-cat, he recalls. "This is the decision that shaped my life since," says Kane.
He says he thought the house would be empty. But Madeline Weisser, 75, and her son, John Bowers, 55, were home. While Kane hid behind a dining-room table, Morton shot and killed Bowers. He then stabbed Weisser in the neck; Garner stepped on the knife, nearly decapitating her.
Morton was sentenced to death. Garner, like Kane, a juvenile offender, was given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 50 years. Kane was also sentenced to life, but he will become eligible for parole after serving 25 years. He doubts that the parole board will ever let him out.
Kane grows emotional when talking about that January night. "I witnessed two people die," he says. "I regret that every day of my life, being any part of that and seeing that." He does not dispute that he deserved punishment but says his sentence is harsh. His days at Sumter Correctional Institution in Bushnell, Fla., are spent in the prison print shop making 55 cents an hour. "You have no hope of getting out," Kane says. "You have no family. You have no moral support here. This can be hard."
Will the court intervene?
In deciding whether "evolving standards" have turned against a particular punishment, the Supreme Court looks at what the states are doing. Life without parole for juvenile offenders is widely used, and only three states specifically ban it. If this form of punishment is to be banned by virtue of its violating the Eighth Amendment, it will likely happen only when a majority of the states first outlaw it.
Robert W. Attridge, the prosecutor in Kane's case, says he feels sorry for him. "But he had options," Attridge says. "He had a way out. The other boys decided to leave.
"Could Tim Kane be your kid, being in the wrong place at the wrong time?" the prosecutor asks. "I think he could. It takes one night of bad judgment and, man, your life can be ruined."

Advocates for Abandoned Adolescents - Our Mission is to do better!

Vengeance at its most shameful

Jordan Brown, a resident of western Pennsylvania, is charged with shooting Kenzie Marie Houk and her unborn child. Police say that Brown shot her once at point blank range. Today, a  judge ruled [thanks to Doc Berman via Gamso] that the prosecution against Brown can remain in his court and denied the defense’s motion for transfer of venue.
Jordan Brown is 12. At the time of the death of Houk, he was 11.
I repeat. Jordan Brown is 12. And a judge ruled that he can be tried as an adult. A state in these United States is about to prosecute an eleven year old as an adult murderer.
Here is a file picture of him, taken from CNN. Look at it. This cherubic 12 year old now faces life in prison. The rest of the post after the photo and the jump.

That this decision – to deny a transfer to juvenile court – is an abomination is an understatement. This decision makes Brown the youngest child charged as an adult anywhere in America.
The reasoning for doing so is even more shameful.

Since being charged with the murder of his father’s fiance, Jordan Brown, through his defense attorneys, has asserted his innocence.
Largely because of those denials, a Lawrence County judge ruled Monday that Brown, now 12 years old, will stand trial as an adult.
In his 17-page decision, [Judge Dominick] Motto ruled that the defense failed to meet its burden, in large part because Brown’s continued denials in the crime show an unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions, a necessary factor in rehabilitation.
Motto said that point was established by both forensic psychologists in the case — John O’Brien, who testified for the prosecution, and Kirk Heilbrun, the defense’s expert — who testified in de-certification hearings Jan. 29 and March 12

That the burden is on the defense to show that the child is capable of rehabilitation and is not a danger to society is absurd. The state of the law belies a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and manner of the child psychology and the development of the human mind.
But again, this is an 11-12 year old we’re talking about. The law in Pennsylvania is that anyone above the age of 10 (10!!!) can be tried as an adult. In Connecticut, the threshold is 14.
To compound the travesty that is the untenably low age threshold and the burden on the defense to show something that should be presumed, the Judge then relies on the lack of “acceptance of responsibility” of an 11-12 year old to justify his decision to treat him like a full-grown adult. This is  judicial cowardice of the worst kind.
To say that in order to be treated as a juvenile, a child must display the kind of emotional maturity that most adults in the system are unable to display well into their 40s and then use the lack of that adult development to justify treating the child as an adult is mind-bogglingly contradictory and stupid.
The prosecutor gets no points, either. He, seemingly honestly, states:

“This is something that you wouldn’t even think of in your worst nightmare, that you’d have to charge an 11-year-old with homicide,” [Lawrence County District Attorney John] Bongivengo told a local CNN affiliate in Pittsburgh when Houk was killed in February 2009. “It’s heinous, the whole situation.”

This statement rings hollow. If this is your worst nightmare, John Bongivengo, then do something about it. If the decision is truly with the court to decide whether to transfer the case back to juvenile court, then side with the defense in urging the judge to do so. Don’t file a brief and argue that your relatively inexperienced “expert” correctly concluded that there is “very limited” capacity for juvenile treatment.
I understand the reasons for permitting juveniles to be tried as adults in the most serious of crimes. You do adult things, you face adult consequences. But to bring an 11-year old under aegis of such legal chicanery is appalling.
In most murder prosecutions – and certainly in death penalty prosecutions – vengeance is a driving factor. Punishment and revenge rule the day. But this is not the place for it and certainly an 11-year old is not a worthy object of the collective wrath of the adult criminal justice system.
It is a tragedy that Houk died and her unborn child along with it. But allowing this prosecution to continue does nothing but add to the utter destruction these people’s lives have already experienced. There is no need for vengeance here, but rather for the stern understanding displayed by a disappointed parent toward an unknowing, developmentally undeveloped adolescent.
When the law provides for him to be punished as juvenile for the next 10-11 years of his life, seeking to have as 12 year old incarcerated for the remainder of his natural life smells of nothing but shameful bloodlust.
As an 11-year old, Jordan Brown would still be in middle school. Maybe he just started noticing girls. Maybe he still wants to be a policeman or firefighter. He probably hasn’t stopped growing. And here we are, the best justice system in the world, condemning him to the possibility of spending the rest of his life in jail.
If this isn’t cruel and unusual, I don’t know what is.
Advocates for Abandoned Adolescents - Our Mission is to do better!