Newspaper News Feature Story

Carley Anderson, Tribal Tribune
Wando HS (Mt. Pleasant, S.C.)

How young is too young? Supreme Court settles issue of capital punishment for minors, but controversy still rages

It was 2 a.m. when they slid through the open back window.

Christopher Simmons had a plan.

The two moved quickly through the house, crossing the kitchen and entering the darkened the hallway. As Simmons reached for the light, a woman’s voice came from the bedroom.

She was sitting up in bed, he later recalled, as the boys entered the room.

An hour later, Shirley Ann Crooks was lying hog-tied at the bottom of St. Louis, Missouri’s Merremac River, Simmons and his 15-year-old accomplice staring down from the railroad trestle 40 feet above her.

Simmons wears a triumphant smirk in the mug shot taken following his arrest the next afternoon, the same smug grin he would wear as he confessed to police his crime and motivations behind it.

Simmons was 17, and as he had bragged to his friends repeatedly before carrying out the meticulously premeditated murder, because of his age, he was sure he’d “get away with it.”

Now 12 years later, many students feel he has succeeded.

On March 1, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Simmons’ life sentence and declared executing convicted murderers for crimes committed before their 18th birthday constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” and was thus banned under the U.S. constitution.

The case has sparked heated debate among victims’ rights advocates and psychiatric professionals, and as recent discoveries in adolescent psychological development have begun to surface, many students are questioning where the line between childhood and adulthood should ultimately be drawn.

According to junior Capers Rumph, the law should not discriminate based on the age of violent perpetrators.

“If you are old enough to succeed in killing someone, you are old enough to be tried for it,” she said. “You don’t have to be an adult — there is no magic age when you’re going to know right from wrong.”

Violent criminals, she continued, should not be able to evade the consequences of their actions “simply because they are a few months short of adulthood.”

Senior Mitchell Huff agreed.

“Most teens that commit crimes do not believe they are going to be caught,” he said. “Perhaps they would not have the moral development to understand fully the consequences of their actions, but still…the responsibility lies with them, even if they made a foolish decision.”

Clinical psychologist John Roitschz of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina said the age at which a person should know right from wrong ultimately depends on his intelligence.

“However, assuming they are somewhere near normal intelligence, most people have felt that a child of seven, without ‘mental disease’ should be able to tell right from wrong,” he said.

According to Roitschz, exerts hold that children go through definite stages of moral development.

“The problem with this system is that not everyone goes through stages,” he said. “Some stop in one of the earlier stages,” he said.

In fact, only about 25 percent of the people go through the stage six — the “Golden Rule” stage.

“Most stop at the fourth stage, the ‘Law and Order’ stages in which you do or do not do something because it is the law,” Roitschz said.

He said whether or not an individual expresses control over his or her behavior is more of an independent issue than a “teenage one.”

“In addition to biological factors, because of previous experiences or learning, some teenagers may express greater control over their behavior than others,” Roitschz said.

He said perpetrators should thus be tried on a case-by-case basis to decide whether the individual knew right from wrong and was mentally able to control his actions at the time of their crime.

Though Roitschz said most teenagers obviously know “whether their behaviors are right from wrong or would be approved by their parents or society,” and adolescent brain does not have the maturity of a fully developed adult brain, particularly in the area that controls resisting impulses.

“That is probably why they are more likely to take chances, to do riskier things and to act impulsively,” Roitschz said.

Criminal law attorney Andrew Savage said the Supreme Court heard testimony from Simmons’ attorney attesting to such facts and explained one of the court’s major justifications for its recent ruling.

“The idea behind trying juveniles is that the growth in their minds and brains is not sufficient to let them be judged on the same standards as adults,” he said. “The question the Supreme Court was dealing with was whether or not it is cruel and unusual punishment to apply the same standard that we apply to adults as kids.”

He said the decision to try and individual juvenile as an adult begins at the family court level.

“The family court judge will take into account the maliciousness of the crime, whether it was premeditated, and whether it was a violent crime, and the prosecutor will decide whether to take the juvenile and asked that he be tried as an adult,” Savage said. “This is typically done in the case of horrendous crimes.”

He cited the recent trial of Christopher Pittman, who murdered his grandparents at the age of 12, as an example of such a case. However, he said that personally he finds it “difficult trying a 12-year-old as an adult when we consider a 12 year old to be otherwise completely immature.

“You have to look at how we as a society view these kids. They aren’t allowed to vote, drink or drive, yet we are holding them as accountable for murder as a 30-year-old?” Savage said.

Junior Tiffany Verkaik said society’s standards should be irrelevant in the handing down of Pittman’s sentence.

“The standards are different everywhere — in Europe, kids can drink when they’re 16 and drive at 18. It’s obvious hat the line between childhood and adulthood is going to vary,” she said.

“There are kids who want to kill, who are aware of what they’re doing,” Verkaik said, “and they shouldn’t be able to use their age as an excuse because they don’t want the death sentence.”

Staff writer Jason Novak contributed to this story.