Post by abbey1227 on Jun 3, 2021 22:59:35 GMT
The New York Times
A 7-Year-Old Was Accused of Rape. Is Arresting Him the Answer?
Sarah Maslin Nir Thu, June 3, 2021, 7:04 AM
At the forested edge of the Canadian border this spring, state police arrested a person from the hamlet of Brasher Falls, New York, population about 1,000. He was charged with rape.
The pain of such crimes often tears small towns apart without rippling beyond their borders. But following the March 23 arrest, news of the arrest ricocheted far beyond the hamlet.
The resident charged with rape was a 7-year-old boy.
Little is known about the circumstances of the arrest, the specifics of the allegations or the case’s disposition. The records of cases involving children are kept private. But in New York, the arrest reignited a discussion about how the justice system deals with so-called young offenders.
Judges, juvenile justice experts and lawyers who have handled such cases from both sides of the courtroom say arrests traumatize children, ensnare them in the legal system and increase their chance of recidivism. Arresting children so young, they say, ignores the science of brain development and in an attempt to seek justice often achieves the opposite result.
“What we know now is that the science doesn’t support prosecution of second graders,” said Dawne Mitchell, who leads the Legal Aid Society’s juvenile rights practice. Citing cognitive science that shows such young children lack true awareness of the consequences of their actions, and that emphasizes the psychological trauma of being cuffed and prosecuted, Mitchell is one of a growing number of experts across the country urging states to raise their age minimums.
The incident in Brasher Falls in November, and a video of police handcuffing and pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl in Rochester in the back of a police car in January, have renewed focus on a bill that has continued to work its way through New York’s Legislature. It would raise the minimum age at which a child may be charged as a juvenile delinquent in family court from 7 to 12 (except for homicide offenses) and divert cases involving younger children to social and other services.
The push follows a similar movement to raise the age at which people can be criminally responsible as adults. In 2019, New York state completed a phase-in that raised the age at which teenagers can be charged as adults for misdemeanors and most felonies from 16 to 18 years old.
The attempt to raise what is known as the age of delinquency has moved more slowly.
Despite apparent broad agreement — including a 2018 call by the United Nations for countries to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 — there has been little legislative traction. That is in part because there are relatively few criminal cases brought against small children, said N. Nick Perry, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn who co-signed the legislation that was first introduced in 2018.
“There are not a lot of 7-year-olds who are getting snagged in some egregious criminal charge,” said Perry, who expects the law to pass this legislative session. “If something egregious does not draw the attention to the need to update or change the law, it will hang around, as improper as it is.”
But other states have begun to make changes to their laws: In 2018, Massachusetts raised its minimum age from 7 to 12. California and Utah also set 12 as the minimum age. Recently, Mississippi enacted a law raising its age at which children can be committed to juvenile facilities from 10 to 12. Similar legislation is being considered in more than half a dozen states.
Still, more than half of American states have no minimum age at all. Of those that do, only North Carolina, at age 6, has a lower minimum than New York.
Earlier this year in North Carolina, a 6-year-old boy was arrested and taken to court after he picked a tulip while waiting at a bus stop, according to a report in the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina.
The case was dismissed but set off a furor. “Should a child that believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy be making life-altering decisions?” J.H. Corpening, the Chief District Court judge of New Hanover County, asked, expressing his belief that such young children are unaware of the consequences of behavior that could be considered criminal. North Carolina is also considering a change to its law.
The proposal in New York to direct children younger than 12 who are accused of serious crimes to social service agencies would in a sense codify what experts say often occurs already.
Across New York state in 2019, for example, of the hundreds of children 12 and younger who were arrested, just 121 cases went through Family Court proceedings, according to records obtained by the Children’s Defense Fund-New York, the New York office of the national policy advocacy group.
Juvenile arrests are also often carried out inequitably along racial lines: In 2019, more than 90% of children age 7 to 11 arrested in New York City were Black or Hispanic, according to data provided by Legal Aid, though those groups make up just 57% of the city’s population of children.
White children, experts say, are more likely to be sent to therapists or returned to their parents for the same behavior for which Black children are arrested, a pattern reflected nationwide.
There appears to be little, if any, organized opposition to raising the age of delinquency. But those who resist say doing so would hamstring the legal system, according to Jeffrey A. Butts, the director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research and Evaluation Center. In rare cases involving a particularly dangerous child, he said, incarceration may prevent them from being a risk to others.
“You’ll always have these cases where you just don’t have the right resources,” Butts said. “Any red line set by law is a compromise that basically acknowledges we don’t have a legal system that is capable of making complex decisions.”
Many who study juvenile justice say young offenders are often the victims of abuse themselves. As a small child, the rage Charles A. Rice felt over the physical and sexual abuse he said he suffered at home came out at school in violent bursts.
Then one afternoon, while building a wire sculpture in fifth grade art class at his elementary school in Syracuse, New York, he scuffled with a classmate. His teacher intervened, and Charles grabbed one of his art supplies — an X-acto knife — and slashed him. Rice, who is Black, was arrested.
He spent eight months in a juvenile detention center. Rice, now 31 and an advocate for at-risk youth, believes that if he had been white, he would have been offered therapy. “It was the criminalization of my childhood,” he said. “My behavior was crying for help — not handcuffs.”
In Massachusetts, in the three years since the new law took effect, there has been no uptick in criminal activity by children, according to Sana Fadel, the deputy director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, even as the juvenile court system’s caseload has dropped by 40%. Rather, children are being handled via supportive programs that focus on delivering social services, she said.
“The legal system is probably a hundred years behind, because the usual test is, ‘Do you understand that this is right and this is wrong?’ ” said Jane Tewksbury, who worked in Massachusetts as a prosecutor and later served as commissioner of the state’s youth services department. “A 4-year-old could say that, but that doesn’t mean if they stabbed somebody with a pencil that they actually know what’s happening.”
Court proceedings can also be incomprehensible for small children. When Debbie Freitas, a lawyer based in Lowell, Massachusetts, brought an 8-year-old client before a magistrate in 2018 for bringing a butter knife to school, the child exclaimed: “ ‘Oh, wow, are we going to see the president?’ ” Freitas recalled. “They are so young they do not understand the very basics of what is going on.”
News of the arrest in Brasher Falls stunned residents, said Mark A. Peets, the supervisor of the Town of Brasher. “You can’t fathom a 7-year-old being arrested; you watch all these ‘true crimes’ on TV, and you just never think of a 7-year-old,” he said.
But alongside the collective grief for the victim, he said, is a sense that such a young perpetrator too must need help.
“There is right and wrong, but there has got to be some sort of social service protocol,” Peets said, “some sort of way to handle this without him being treated almost like an adult.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
A 7-Year-Old Was Accused of Rape. Is Arresting Him the Answer?
Sarah Maslin Nir Thu, June 3, 2021, 7:04 AM
At the forested edge of the Canadian border this spring, state police arrested a person from the hamlet of Brasher Falls, New York, population about 1,000. He was charged with rape.
The pain of such crimes often tears small towns apart without rippling beyond their borders. But following the March 23 arrest, news of the arrest ricocheted far beyond the hamlet.
The resident charged with rape was a 7-year-old boy.
Little is known about the circumstances of the arrest, the specifics of the allegations or the case’s disposition. The records of cases involving children are kept private. But in New York, the arrest reignited a discussion about how the justice system deals with so-called young offenders.
Judges, juvenile justice experts and lawyers who have handled such cases from both sides of the courtroom say arrests traumatize children, ensnare them in the legal system and increase their chance of recidivism. Arresting children so young, they say, ignores the science of brain development and in an attempt to seek justice often achieves the opposite result.
“What we know now is that the science doesn’t support prosecution of second graders,” said Dawne Mitchell, who leads the Legal Aid Society’s juvenile rights practice. Citing cognitive science that shows such young children lack true awareness of the consequences of their actions, and that emphasizes the psychological trauma of being cuffed and prosecuted, Mitchell is one of a growing number of experts across the country urging states to raise their age minimums.
The incident in Brasher Falls in November, and a video of police handcuffing and pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl in Rochester in the back of a police car in January, have renewed focus on a bill that has continued to work its way through New York’s Legislature. It would raise the minimum age at which a child may be charged as a juvenile delinquent in family court from 7 to 12 (except for homicide offenses) and divert cases involving younger children to social and other services.
The push follows a similar movement to raise the age at which people can be criminally responsible as adults. In 2019, New York state completed a phase-in that raised the age at which teenagers can be charged as adults for misdemeanors and most felonies from 16 to 18 years old.
The attempt to raise what is known as the age of delinquency has moved more slowly.
Despite apparent broad agreement — including a 2018 call by the United Nations for countries to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 — there has been little legislative traction. That is in part because there are relatively few criminal cases brought against small children, said N. Nick Perry, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn who co-signed the legislation that was first introduced in 2018.
“There are not a lot of 7-year-olds who are getting snagged in some egregious criminal charge,” said Perry, who expects the law to pass this legislative session. “If something egregious does not draw the attention to the need to update or change the law, it will hang around, as improper as it is.”
But other states have begun to make changes to their laws: In 2018, Massachusetts raised its minimum age from 7 to 12. California and Utah also set 12 as the minimum age. Recently, Mississippi enacted a law raising its age at which children can be committed to juvenile facilities from 10 to 12. Similar legislation is being considered in more than half a dozen states.
Still, more than half of American states have no minimum age at all. Of those that do, only North Carolina, at age 6, has a lower minimum than New York.
Earlier this year in North Carolina, a 6-year-old boy was arrested and taken to court after he picked a tulip while waiting at a bus stop, according to a report in the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina.
The case was dismissed but set off a furor. “Should a child that believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy be making life-altering decisions?” J.H. Corpening, the Chief District Court judge of New Hanover County, asked, expressing his belief that such young children are unaware of the consequences of behavior that could be considered criminal. North Carolina is also considering a change to its law.
The proposal in New York to direct children younger than 12 who are accused of serious crimes to social service agencies would in a sense codify what experts say often occurs already.
Across New York state in 2019, for example, of the hundreds of children 12 and younger who were arrested, just 121 cases went through Family Court proceedings, according to records obtained by the Children’s Defense Fund-New York, the New York office of the national policy advocacy group.
Juvenile arrests are also often carried out inequitably along racial lines: In 2019, more than 90% of children age 7 to 11 arrested in New York City were Black or Hispanic, according to data provided by Legal Aid, though those groups make up just 57% of the city’s population of children.
White children, experts say, are more likely to be sent to therapists or returned to their parents for the same behavior for which Black children are arrested, a pattern reflected nationwide.
There appears to be little, if any, organized opposition to raising the age of delinquency. But those who resist say doing so would hamstring the legal system, according to Jeffrey A. Butts, the director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research and Evaluation Center. In rare cases involving a particularly dangerous child, he said, incarceration may prevent them from being a risk to others.
“You’ll always have these cases where you just don’t have the right resources,” Butts said. “Any red line set by law is a compromise that basically acknowledges we don’t have a legal system that is capable of making complex decisions.”
Many who study juvenile justice say young offenders are often the victims of abuse themselves. As a small child, the rage Charles A. Rice felt over the physical and sexual abuse he said he suffered at home came out at school in violent bursts.
Then one afternoon, while building a wire sculpture in fifth grade art class at his elementary school in Syracuse, New York, he scuffled with a classmate. His teacher intervened, and Charles grabbed one of his art supplies — an X-acto knife — and slashed him. Rice, who is Black, was arrested.
He spent eight months in a juvenile detention center. Rice, now 31 and an advocate for at-risk youth, believes that if he had been white, he would have been offered therapy. “It was the criminalization of my childhood,” he said. “My behavior was crying for help — not handcuffs.”
In Massachusetts, in the three years since the new law took effect, there has been no uptick in criminal activity by children, according to Sana Fadel, the deputy director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, even as the juvenile court system’s caseload has dropped by 40%. Rather, children are being handled via supportive programs that focus on delivering social services, she said.
“The legal system is probably a hundred years behind, because the usual test is, ‘Do you understand that this is right and this is wrong?’ ” said Jane Tewksbury, who worked in Massachusetts as a prosecutor and later served as commissioner of the state’s youth services department. “A 4-year-old could say that, but that doesn’t mean if they stabbed somebody with a pencil that they actually know what’s happening.”
Court proceedings can also be incomprehensible for small children. When Debbie Freitas, a lawyer based in Lowell, Massachusetts, brought an 8-year-old client before a magistrate in 2018 for bringing a butter knife to school, the child exclaimed: “ ‘Oh, wow, are we going to see the president?’ ” Freitas recalled. “They are so young they do not understand the very basics of what is going on.”
News of the arrest in Brasher Falls stunned residents, said Mark A. Peets, the supervisor of the Town of Brasher. “You can’t fathom a 7-year-old being arrested; you watch all these ‘true crimes’ on TV, and you just never think of a 7-year-old,” he said.
But alongside the collective grief for the victim, he said, is a sense that such a young perpetrator too must need help.
“There is right and wrong, but there has got to be some sort of social service protocol,” Peets said, “some sort of way to handle this without him being treated almost like an adult.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
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