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Life Without Parole
tinwhiskers
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From the WI/Walker thread:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wis-supreme-court-14-year-old-can-be-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-without-parole-for-slaying/2011/05/20/AFPrui7G_story.html?wprss=rss_national
TLDR: A 14 year old Omer Nerhim as a group of friends assaulted Vang(13) while he was returning home with some groceries. He fled up a 5 story parking structure. They followed him up to top floor. There Nerhim and his friend grabbbed Vang by the ankles and wrists and threw him squirming and crying 50ft to his death.
The WI supreme court upheld the judges sentence of life w/out parole.
Is a guarenteed life sentance fitting for a 14 year old?
Yes, because of the viscousness and senselessness of the crime. That it was done for no purpose beyond Nerhims amusement, and a 14 year old is capable of understanding: the idea of death, that throwing someone off a 5 story building will kill them, and that throwing someone crying and struggling off a building is wrong.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wis-supreme-court-14-year-old-can-be-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-without-parole-for-slaying/2011/05/20/AFPrui7G_story.html?wprss=rss_national
MADISON, Wis. — Fourteen-year-olds convicted of homicide can be sent to prison for life without parole, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Friday in upholding a life sentence for a man who helped throw a boy off a parking ramp when he was a teenager.
In a case watched by psychiatrists, family advocates and defense attorneys, the court found that neither the U.S. nor the Wisconsin Constitution prohibits life sentences without parole for 14-year-olds in homicide cases and no national consensus has formed against such sentences.
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“We ... confirm what objective evidence already informs us: Contemporary society views the punishment as proportionate to the offense,” Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler wrote for the majority.
Omer Ninham was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide for his role in the death of 13-year-old Zong Vang in Green Bay in 1998. Ninham was 14 at the time. A judge sentenced him to life without parole two years later, when Ninham was 16.
Ninham’s attorney, Byron Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, had argued the sentence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. He vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I absolutely believe it’s just a matter of time before states are going to have to re-evaluate the judgment that you can punish (a juvenile) the same way you can punish an adult,” he said. “Children are different than adults. Even when children commit very serious crimes, like the crime in this case, we have to think about their crime differently.”
Judges across the country rarely sentence juvenile offenders to life without parole. According to statistics compiled by the Equal Justice Initiative the Wisconsin justices cited in their opinion, 73 children age 14 or younger across 18 states have received that sentence.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 ruled that sentencing juveniles to death is unconstitutional. Last year that court ruled that life with no parole for anything less than homicide was unconstitutional as well.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have been fighting for reviews of youth life sentences in major crimes since the 2005 ruling. They argue those constitutional prohibitions should extend to homicide cases as well.
The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in Michigan last month alleging that nine people imprisoned when they were minors deserve a chance at parole because their sentences amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
The Wisconsin justices said in their 5-2 decision that Ninham failed to show that children 14 and younger deserve different constitutional status in homicide cases. The lack of homicide life sentences for children across the country doesn’t signal that national sentiment has turned against such sentences, only that juveniles rarely kill people, the justices said.
In Ninham’s case, the punishment fit a crime that “cannot adequately be reduced into words,” the opinion said.
Ninham and four others between the ages of 13 and 14 accosted Vang while the boy was riding his bike home from the grocery store with a bag of tomatoes for his family. According to court documents, Ninham and another member of the group started teasing Vang, then punched him. Vang ran into a nearby hospital parking ramp, where the group cornered him on the top floor.
Ninham and a friend seized Vang by the wrists and ankles. As Vang cried and screamed, they threw him over the edge. He fell five stories to his death. A bystander on the ground said he heard a sound “like a wet bag of cement hitting the pavement.”
The teens fled the scene, but police used statements from some of them to track Ninham down. While he was awaiting trial, he was charged with threatening a judge and his friends who spoke to police.
Under Wisconsin law, anyone 10 or older accused of homicide can be tried in the adult system. A jury convicted Ninham of first-degree intentional homicide and child abuse in 2000. The other charges were dismissed, but the judge was allowed to consider them at Ninham’s sentencing.
First-degree intentional homicide carries a mandatory life sentence in Wisconsin. The state does not have the death penalty. The only issue at sentencing is whether a judge will grant parole eligibility.
Brown County Judge John D. McKay gave Ninham, who was by then 16, life in prison and denied him any chance at parole. The judge noted Ninham had a tough family life and he snorted cocaine weekly and drank every day, usually until he passed out.
But he said the crime devastated Vang’s family and the Green Bay community and described Ninham as a “frightening young man.”
The Wisconsin Psychiatric Association and the Wisconsin Psychological Association were among the groups that filed informational briefs in the case. The associations’ attorney, Mike Halfenger, said his clients believe a juvenile should at least have the chance at a parole, but it may ultimately be up to state legislatures to reach that conclusion on their own.
“At least hold the door open,” he said, “for the argument that the person I appeared to be as a minor is not the person I was capable of becoming.”
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TLDR: A 14 year old Omer Nerhim as a group of friends assaulted Vang(13) while he was returning home with some groceries. He fled up a 5 story parking structure. They followed him up to top floor. There Nerhim and his friend grabbbed Vang by the ankles and wrists and threw him squirming and crying 50ft to his death.
The WI supreme court upheld the judges sentence of life w/out parole.
Is a guarenteed life sentance fitting for a 14 year old?
Yes, because of the viscousness and senselessness of the crime. That it was done for no purpose beyond Nerhims amusement, and a 14 year old is capable of understanding: the idea of death, that throwing someone off a 5 story building will kill them, and that throwing someone crying and struggling off a building is wrong.
tinwhiskers on
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A fourteen year old may not have the faculty to understand:
- Which political candidate is a better choice
- The ramifications of sex
- The ramifications of entering into a contractual agreement
- etc
But a fourteen year old does have the faculty to undertand:
- Throwing someone off of a five story building will kill them
But do they have the mental faculties to understand the ramifications of killing someone?
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Yes. Yes they do.
Yes, the person is dead. Really part and parcel with the whole killing thing.
I mean, it's possible he's just an irredeemable sociopath, but we should at least try.
If rehabilitation isn't even on the table, if we're categorically condemning him, why wouldn't we simply execute him? It would be cheaper, and roughly as ethical.
Theres also the fact that there is no known treatment for antisocial personality disorder(sociopathy).
Yes, I'm a very firm believer in execution. Not as punishment, per se, but I accept that a society will conduct itself in such a manner that, now and again, individuals will come along who will simply never be able to fit into that society's system, regardless of why or if anybody is at fault. Those people should not be forced to eek out a miserable existence, they should be executed.
Yes. He's likely to do something bad again. From the OP's link, he didn't show remorse and was brought up on additional charges of threatening his buddies if they ratted him out.
With no proven treatment, theres all risk and minimal incentive to allow for it.
Death penalty is off the table. They don't have it in Wisconsin, at least until Walker gets around to it. We didn't even execute Dahmer.
Of course, like Dahmer but for different reasons, a teenager's life expectency in a hard slam pennitentiary will likely be short, either by murder or suicide, not that it applies much in this specific case, since the crime was in '98 and he's now about 27.
But scientific evidence is pretty certain that you're not fully developed mentally as a teenager. Punishing a teenager for life is essentially punishing two seperate people, because the adult that they become could be nothing like the teenager.
Without the possibility of parole, you're essentially saying "this person will never be redeemed." Now, I'm not a Christian, but I do believe in redemption. I'm not saying "let him go after X years," but I do think that psychologists should be the ones to determine if the guy is a further risk to society after he's served the majority of his life sentence.
He threw a kid kicking and screaming off a 5 story building...gonna consult my sociopath checklist, but I'm guessing a yes.
My point is that we are obligated to make an attempt at rehabilitation. I'm not about to assert that it's likely to succeed.
This is a really good point. And I guess goes further to show that, apparently, we'd rather write him off. Which makes me wonder why they don't just kill him.
14 year old boys can be gigantic and short-sighted douchebags though, and no one wants to be ratted out.
Yup. All that needed to be done was to read the following quote, and the sentence is more than justified.
There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility. - President Theodore Roosevelt
yeah, read a bit further down the wiki page.
You know, there is kind of a reason they don't diagnose children who are not fully emotionally developed as sociopaths.
You can't trot out science about ASPD when the definition of the disorder you are describing specifically excludes the person you are talking about.
If Vang had been cursing them out as he was dragged--as opposed to "crying and screaming"--do you think that would affect your opinion?
Prison, no. But people can change a lot as they get older, and if there's even a small chance that a kid might reform than we should at least consider giving him parole.
Going off of the article, i'd say no. Keep his ass in jail.
Someone who kills someone else for their own enjoyment is a credible threat to everyone around them, as far as i'm concerned. From the looks of it, this wasn't a crime of passion, or a simple mistake. It was plain, out and out, cold blooded murder for kicks and personal enjoyment.
There's no excuse for that. And you damn well aren't going to convince someone who adopts that view-point that the act of murder was a bad thing, from that perspective. The punishment might make them feel guilty, but the act itself is irrelevant to that. It's guilt over being caught, essentially.
Furthermore, a fourteen year old isn't a six year old. He isn't some little kid who thought daddy's revolver was a toy gun, and ended up killing someone. Those responsible initiated a fight that one party didn't want or even expected, went and beat the child they were taunting, then actively pursued him five stories up a building after he fled from the beating, and then had him murdered by throwing him off the top of a building as he was crying and screaming, presumably, at that point, for mercy.
I italicized that, by the way, to make sure people saw it. If you think the kid deserves parole, you really need to think about what was going on in the murderer's heads as they were doing that. To say they had ample opportunity to back down, or stop, is a vast understatement that doesn't even begin to describe the situation.
The kid sounds like a sociopath of the worst sort. There's rehabilitation, and then there's keeping someone out of reach of the public for the public's safety and well being. Sometimes the exception is the rule and best thing to do is, unfortunately, to keep the person locked up.
Parole or not he's not getting out of prison before the age of 18 and a prison most definitely is not the place for normal emotional development to take place. If he wasn't severely fucked up stairs the institution will ensure he is by the time they're done.
The kid he helped throw off of a building doesn't get a chance to become a well-adjusted member of society, so why should the guy who killed him?
If Wisconsin state law won't allow him to be executed, the next best thing is to get him into the system and out of society permanently at 14/16 as opposed to later, after he would have had time to cause more trouble.
I don't disagree with you, but I think the people talking about rehabilitation are talking about something that doesn't actually exist in any meaningful sense in America. It's an ideal, and there are some exceptional cases that can be said to be "rehabilitated", but I think that's largely in spite of the system as it (largely) is.
Admittedly a large part of this is because I absolutely want to know if we would be able to discover how he ended up this broken at the age of 14 and I imagine prison is probably going to break him further.
Punishing a person for their crime doesn't negate the heinous acts they've done, but society itself should be kept safe. I've worked and studied in these kinds of places. They're not prisons and those within aren't treated harshly; you walk around freely, intermingle with others, even hang out in libraries or watch TV. You just probably will never leave.
And I'm okay with that. Until science advances further, sometimes broken people are just broken, for no good reason and there's no fixing it.
hey, then maybe they should send him to an institution where he would receive treatment rather than be abused and raped.
So you're all for eliminating opportunities for people to be productive members of society?
What do you have against society? Isn't it better to have more productive members of society?
Don't make excuses for a douchebag, maybe?
Is he sorry that he murdered someone or is he sorry that he was caught and is now incarcerated? That's a crucial difference for me. I don't see any trace of remorse on the murderer's part so I can't draw from the pity well.
People change because they get world experience as they grow up. This guy's world has been a prison environment, I'm guessing.
Well the prison-industrial-complex isn't uniform. MSNBC does nightly Locked-Up shows, which profile various prisons around the country. For every state-pen with classrooms and programs targeted to keep people from re-offending, there 10 that regularly riot because of the deplorable conditions or have the prisoners and guards at war with each other in almost every sense of the word.
Why not have at least a semblance of an actual diagnosis before declaring someone a sociopath, rather than going with off-the-cuff judgments?
Also, what does it matter that the person was crying and screaming?
Do you think that normal people are incapable of incredible cruelty?
Can someone explain to me why we shouldn't try to rehabilitate criminals? I mean, the american prison system is about punishment, not rehabilitation, so can someone explain to me what good it does to place a 14 year old in a system with problems such as rape being condoned by the public, disenfranchisement and torture (Yes, solitary confinement is psychological torture.)
I don't know, I guess I'd need to have someone close to me murdered in cold blood to understand how good it feels to know someone who did something bad to someone close to me is being treated terribly, because I just don't understand that right now.
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Do you really think that someone who spent some of their most formative years being a blackout drunk, doing coke, and throwing a kid off of a building will ever become a productive member of society?
I don't.
Throwing someone off a building doesn't make you a sociopath. A sociopath is someone that lacks empathy. They can't comprehend the emotions of others and only mimic them to use peope. He could have done it for a number of other passion filled reasons, the article is hardly clear on this point.
This is amature hour internet psychiatry you are pulling here.
Also, there really is a sociopath checklist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
but they're listening to every word I say