Kids Are Kids Until They Commit Crime

Kids Are Kids Until They Commit Crime In her 2001 newspaper article, "Kids Are Kids Until They Commit Crime," Marjie Lundstrum argues against the criminal justice policy of treating juvenile offenders who commit heinous crimes (including murder) as adults. She relies heavily on rhetorical argument, such as posing questions asking how old a twelve-year-old defendant really is and whether he is a boy or a man.

The obvious purpose of the author's rhetoric is to appeal to the audience to object to the punishment of any juveniles as adults, regardless of the severity of their crimes. The author emphasizes one particular line of argument: namely, that teenagers are not considered to be adults in any other aspect of their lives and that all of the common rules of society about the rights and privileges of teenagers is based on the fact that they are not yet capable of adult reasoning and that they lack mature judgment.

In that regard, she points out that teenagers cannot drink or smoke and that children cannot drive legally. The point of that line of reasoning is that it is already fully understood in our society, at least in every other context, that children and teenagers lack the ability to make valid decisions because of their age. On the other hand, as her title suggests, when children or teenagers commit serious crimes, they are often treated as adults, despite the fact that they are still considered children in all other respects.

Clearly, the author hopes to convince her readers that it is logically inconsistent and fundamentally unfair to subject children and teenagers to adult criminal penalties when they are still considered incapable of making decisions in every other respect. Her principal point is simply that society cannot have it both ways: if children and teenagers are too young to make decisions, then they are also too young to be held accountable for their decisions that happen to be very bad, including the decision to commit murder.

MANY KIDS CALLED UNFIT FOR ADULT TRIAL In his 2003 article, "Many Kids Called Unfit For Adult Trial," Greg Krikorian presents an argument against the charging of teenage criminal as adults that focuses on the constitutional principle of mental competence. Specifically, Krikorian argues that studies of the comprehension levels of teenagers below the age of sixteen demonstrate that they lack the necessary intellectual, reasoning, and other cognitive skills to fully understand the justice system and the consequences of their actions and statements.

According to Krikorian, the fact that they are mentally unable to participate in their own defense to criminal charges makes charging them and trying them as adults unconstitutional for the same reason that insane criminals cannot be tried criminally under the U.S. Constitution. Krikorian suggests that if children aged 11 to 13 are three times as likely and children aged 14 to 15 are twice as likely to have mental capacities that are the equivalent to that of mentally impaired adults, that no children who commit crimes.