The teen arrested in Georgia school shooting is not an adult, and shouldn’t be treated like one

[Pelican Press 0]

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The teen arrested in Georgia school ********* is not an ******, and shouldn’t be treated like one

Our society has utterly ******* to come to grips with mass shootings, a fact brought home by the ******, panicked justice system response to

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at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., outside Atlanta.

Colt Gray, 14, is accused of ******** two students and two teachers and wounding nine others with an AR-15-style rifle. Prosecutors charged him as an ******. They also

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, with second-degree *******, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, presumably for failing to keep the **** out of his son’s hands.

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At a Friday hearing, Judge Currie Mingledorff told Colt Gray that if convicted he could be *********. The judge later had to call the teenager back into his courtroom to correct himself: The maximum penalty for a minor is life in prison without the possibility of parole, under a

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decision.

In that opinion, the court acknowledged developing brain science that shows adolescents lack maturity and should not be put to ****** for a ******, however horrendous, they committed before adulthood.

We never needed brain science or that belated court ruling to tell us adolescents are not adults. That difference explains why there is a separate juvenile justice system, which most states have had for more than a century. Minors have less moral and emotional capacity, and logically should be subject to a different level of ********* culpability and punishment. It would be positively medieval to treat a criminally charged child the same as an ******.

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That means more than simply not executing children, or adults who committed their ******* as children. It means not processing them through the ****** system, housing them with ****** offenders or locking them up for their entire ****** lives for acts they committed before they developed ******-level thinking and consciences.

Yet the Supreme Court has

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than not executing juvenile offenders. States are free to continue treating them as adults, and most do, as the most recent ********* underscores. Georgia has a juvenile justice system to acknowledge a minor’s lesser capacity but throws it aside in cases of *******. The reasoning, if that is the right word, seems to be that the more horrific a ****** committed by a juvenile — the more senseless, the more cruel, the more deranged — the more the perpetrator acted with an ******’s moral and emotional capacity. That’s backward.

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The fact is that we still have trouble acknowledging juvenile killers as anything but incomprehensible monsters. A generation ago the U.S. latched onto a bogus notion that some adolescents are sub-human “

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” who must be treated only as if they are wild animals to be caged or put down. Numerous studies have since

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, but *****, anger and the horror of mass killings lead us to throw out modern thinking and practices, and respond to an adolescent’s cruelty with more of the same.

Anything to direct blame away from the instruments of mass *******. The **** lobby has had enormous success beating back laws to regulate firearms and depicting them as protection against ********* and symbols of freedom, rather than sources of ********* and destroyers of life. Georgia is an open-carry state, for example, and when recently signing a bill to expand **** rights, its governor, Brian Kemp, boasted — without irony — about

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.

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This story originally appeared in

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#teen #arrested #Georgia #school #********* #****** #shouldnt #treated

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