In a controversy highlighted by several local cases, Tennessee lawmakers and officials across the nation are debating how to manage minors who commit rape and other violent sex crimes. This week a Shelby County judge will decide what to do with Memphis' youngest known rapists, ages 7 and 9, who admitted luring a 2-year-old neighbor from her yard in August.
Several states have passed laws redefining the duties of juvenile courts by decreasing the role of rehabilitation in favor of punishment. Such laws have led to statutes that utilize blinded sentences, mandatory minimum sentences and extended jurisdiction of juvenile courts. States have given adult criminal courts jurisdiction over juvenile crimes. Some have restructured correctional facilities to accomodate the rise of younger inmates.
In just two years, Joe Harris Sullivan committed 17 criminal offenses, including several serious felonies and numerous violations even while in detention. Then, on May 4, 1989, when Sullivan was 13 years old, he helped rob the home of a 72-year-old woman - and he returned later that day, threw a black slip over her head and raped her so brutally that she required surgery. Having exhausted every attempt at rehabilitation, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Now, 20 years later, Sullivan gets a chance for his lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court on Monday that the U.S. Constitution suddenly forbids life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders, at least if their crimes do not result in another's death. Also Monday, Terrance Graham, who, a month shy of his 18th b...
In response to perceived increases in violent youth crime, the last two decades have witnessed a national trend toward getting tough on youth crime and holding youthful offenders more accountable. A central element in this national trend is the transfer of juveniles to adult criminal court, where the consequences of conviction are in various ways much more severe than they are in juvenile court. The transfer trend is deeply flawed. Juvenile crime deserves punishment, and serious juvenile crime deserves serious punishment. Moreover, some juveniles - especially older, more mature juveniles who are repeat offenders - may deserve to be tried and punished in adult criminal court. But the trend to try ever younger juveniles as adults based solely on the gravity of their crimes is mistaken and...
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State to State - Brief Article
CHESAPEAKE Police have arrested a 31-year-old Chesapeake man accused of a dozen sex crimes against a minor younger than 13 .
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(Thirty-two states already require children adjudicated for sex crimes in juvenile court to register as sex offenders, according to the federal Center for Sex Offender Management, but they are still not ready to meet the other requirements of the law.) Some sex abuse and juvenile justice experts oppose the law more broadly, saying that it could make recidivists out of children who would otherwise have offended once, and that it will derail efforts to boost reporting and prevention of sex crimes.
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