It pisses me off the brownie points prosecutors try to get trying minors as adults
because of the seriousness of the crime.
That’s a category error.
The seriousness of the crime does not affect their being adults.
If you want to argue that teenage brains are no different from adult brains and/or that younger people do not have a better chance of being changed (especially if they are not sent to adult prisons), fine. Do that? At least that means you understand the category and disagree with it. You disagree with the intention of trying young people in a different way than adults and you disagree with it.
But saying due to the nature of this crime, this is not really an underage teenager, is confused, and since getting bigger sentences and higher profile trials, against defendents who can be named in the news BENEFITS prosecutors in their social professional circles and careers, they should be publically spanked for being so philosophically challenged.
Now if people want to come and say juvenile courts are too lenient or whatever, they are also not addressing the issue.
A category error. Hmm. What are the hard lines of this category? Is the category of ‘adult’ defined by the day after your 17th birthday? --Law has to codify generalities, but wouldn’t it be nice sometimes if law could more closely map reality, when it can? Or the interpretation of it.
What does being an adult even mean? --Planning, mature/sophisticated forethought about effects and impacts, dedication, purposiveness…? Doing all these things makes a crime more serious.
What is the alternative, that the same crime can get a drastically different sentence based on a day apart, potentially?
Right off it’s not the crime that is different, but the criminal. This doesn’t take away from your problem with a day making a difference - I’ll get to that. But I think this is the problem with the way many people think about the issue. That the crime is somehow less horrible if committed by a minor and of course it is not. A dead father is a dead father to his kids, period. The main ideas, as filtered through my lazy mind for years from society, are mainly focused on adolescent brains being more impulsive (the prefrontal cortex is not yet in as much control as it is later) that the actions of teenagers have a lot more to do with nurture and that young people can be rehabilitated more easily. Further, and really along the last points plastic brain concerns, they can also be turned into worse criminals if put with adults and serving adult sentences with the kinds of penal strategies adults are punished with. Juvenile offenders, at least in theory, are more likely to be treated with rehabilitation and even education in focus, where punishment (defacto or stated) is the focus with adults.
So there is some understanding that the youth offender is less in control, more likely to be affected by peers and crack addict parents coupled with the greater potential to be retrained. The adult has their prefrontal cortex in place AND STILL did that shit and also is less neuroplastic now. Get out the Pavlovian tools and forget the rest.
Yes, of course the day shift is ludicrous. Best would be some kind of sliding scale informed by competent psychological evaluations of a variety of things in the offender. So that a judge is not hogtied to destroying the guy who commits a felony at his 18th birthday party and letting his twin who was born a minute after midnight spend a month in a juvenile center. Of course technicalities and random boundaries are all over the court system. Drive drunk through a classroom that is being renovated and no kids are in there while your twin brother hits the school in his souped up chevy where the kids are in class and you get very different lives as a result. You’re both dangerous assholes but one of you is going away for a long long time. Contingency is the strange bedfellow of the law.