Our society has utterly failed to come to grips with mass shootings, a fact brought home by the angry, panicked justice system response to Wednesday’s deadly attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, outside Atlanta.
Colt Gray, 14, is accused of killing two students and two teachers and wounding nine others with an AR-15-style rifle. Prosecutors charged him as an adult. They also charged his father, Colin Gray, with second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, presumably for failing to keep the gun out of his son’s hands.
At a Friday hearing, Judge Currie Mingledorff told Colt Gray that if convicted he could be executed. 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 landmark 2005 Supreme Court decision.
In that opinion, the court acknowledged developing brain science that shows adolescents lack maturity and should not be put to death for a crime, 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 criminal culpability and punishment. It would be positively medieval to treat a criminally charged child the same as an adult.
That means more than simply not executing children, or adults who committed their crimes as children. It means not processing them through the adult system, housing them with adult offenders or locking them up for their entire adult lives for acts they committed before they developed adult-level thinking and consciences.
Yet the Supreme Court has declined to go much further than not executing juvenile offenders. States are free to continue treating them as adults, and most do, as the most recent shooting underscores. Georgia has a juvenile justice system to acknowledge a minor’s lesser capacity but throws it aside in cases of murder. The reasoning, if that is the right word, seems to be that the more horrific a crime committed by a juvenile — the more senseless, the more cruel, the more deranged — the more the perpetrator acted with an adult’s moral and emotional capacity. That’s backward.
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 “superpredators” who must be treated only as if they are wild animals to be caged or put down. Numerous studies have since debunked that theory, but fear, 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 murder. The gun lobby has had enormous success beating back laws to regulate firearms and depicting them as protection against violence and symbols of freedom, rather than sources of violence and destroyers of life. Georgia is an open-carry state, for example, and when recently signing a bill to expand gun rights, its governor, Brian Kemp, boasted — without irony — about arming his three children.
— Los Angeles Times