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368

Boy, 15, who fatally stabbed teenager he did not know in Birmingham is jailed for life (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

128 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Summary

A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 days ago (10 children)

It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.

In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This isn't a whole life sentence but 13 years and then parole for the rest of his life.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago (5 children)

When I was 15, I knew it was wrong to stab people. It's not like getting into a fight on the playground. When you bring out a knife, or any deadly weapon, you immediately escalate things way beyond what school administration can handle.

As a kid, I knew there were crimes I could do that were just "boys being boys." Smoking weed, petty theft, vandalism, even getting into fist-fights. I also knew there were crimes that were off limits, such as rape and murder. Just about everyone around me knew the same thing, too.

You're advocating for a culture that encourages kids to commit more crimes and more serious crimes than they otherwise would because they know they will get off easy.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Your prescription seems to assume that either:

Everyone can be rehabilitated, which no society has ever achieved.
That it's preferable to push a well understood risk to people's lives back into the community than it is to keep that risk in the care of the state where they can't kill more people.

...but you strike me as too sensible to prescribe that kind of thing, so what have I missed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

“Western” countries don’t have a way to deal with the handful of truly irredeemable criminals. They will not and cannot be members of society ever.

But what do we do with them? Lock them up forever? Kill them? Nobody knows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

I think it's pretty straightforwardly reasonable to say that we should above all else, remove their ability to continue to do harm. There's going to be a range of views on exactly what that should look like - mostly based on your view of how punitive we should be. Options would include confinement, exile, medication, lobotomy, and execution.

Personally, I think ending someone through death, lobotomy, and the like is unnecessarily barbaric. Confinement in one form or another seems like the most reasonable option, and I think consentual alternatives are debatable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Lots of/most/almost all prisoners are rehabilitated though?

We only hear about the very small minority that make attention grabbing headlines.

I'm in Europe BTW.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Good.

We should not let acts of violence like go unpunished.

We need to set an example for anyone else who may be thinking about committing the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

If your goal is to act as a deterrent then harsher sentences do not work, at least according to research.

At this point, we think it is fair to say that we know of no reputable criminologist who has looked carefully at the overall body of research literature on “deterrence through sentencing” who believes that crime rates will be reduced, through deterrence, by raising the severity of sentences handed down in criminal courts.

https://www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/research-publications/faculty-publications/issues-related-harsh-sentences-and-mandatory-minimum

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 4 days ago (17 children)

This is genuinely disappointing. I understand the need for punishment, but unless there is therapy, a path to recovery and reintegration into society, we're just housing more and more people without a future.

[–] [email protected] 129 points 4 days ago (31 children)

I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.

Yes? What do you think they're implying, that we should try to rehabilitate criminals... but only if they're still young?

I think (and forgive me if I'm wrong) they're essentially saying that without a rehabilitory justice system, we're just locking people up for life and creating a net drain on society. Financially, culturally... it's a morale drain on our nation, even.

Not to mention that as a society we're abandoning a person who, through a justice system built on rehabilitation and not some ye oldie Catholic concept of creating a punishing Hell on Earth, could actually flourish one day, adding to our society instead of taking from it.

A prison system designed to simply incarcerate, punish and torture those it touches will never offer anywhere near the same benefits to us as one that is designed to attempt to rehabilitate.

Not everybody can be rehabilitated, of course, but that's like saying we shouldn't try to treat cancer, because not everybody can be cured.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Sure but what's even the point of a youth Justice system if you're gonna say that and try every kid as an adult?

[–] [email protected] 95 points 4 days ago

Youth justice is for the many nuanced & lower stakes scenarios. Stealing a car, breaking windows, shoplifting/petty theft, getting into fights, drug abuse/addiction, arson, criminal mischief, etc.

Not stabbing strangers to death.

You can't equate the two.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of "boundary exploring" behaviors.

A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with "kids" so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.

The tolerance we have for "youthful indiscretion" does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (28 children)

You got the purpose of juvenile justice completely wrong: It is focussed more on rehabilitation and less on deterrence than the adult one because juveniles are still way more formable. Psychologists will descend upon him, and they'll do the job his parents and neighbours didn't (or couldn't) do, a job which, at 15, noone is able to do on their own.

those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.

That's vile. Of course they'll be unredeemable if you don't give them the chance to redeem themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of “boundary exploring” behaviors.

A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with “kids” so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.

If you're distinguishing by the type of offense instead of by age, you don't have a youth justice system, you have a minor offense justice system.
Distinguishing by the severity of the offense is already part of the justice system.
Youth justice systems explicitly consider the age and maturity of the offender, not just what they did.
Also I'm not sure why a 15-year-old is a kid in one of your examples and a "kid" in the other.

The tolerance we have for “youthful indiscretion” does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.

This is not about tolerating behavior, it's about reforming people to become members of society instead of lifelong burdens for the justice system.
Despite the severity of his action, brandishing kids as "irredeemable" not only throws away their entire future but also burdens everyone else with keeping them contained forever.
That profits nobody.

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 4 days ago

I actually read the article, and if you get all the way to the first sentence, you'll learn that he will be eligible for release starting at 28.

A 15-year-old boy who followed a teenager he did not know through Birmingham city centre and stabbed him to death after a four-minute conversation has been jailed for life with a minimum of 13 years.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (3 children)

What about the other teenager? The one who died?
He never gets to go home, he'll never be part of society again.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

While that's obviously very sad and tragic the purpose of criminal justice should never be vengeance or an eye for an eye. It should be about rehabilitation and reintegration. Yes it's awful that a life was lost but functionally removing another life from society for forever is hardly a good solution.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Takes care of recidivism, though. But I wouldn't advocate it for that reason.

Someone who will commit murder at the age of 15 is very badly damaged, and will need a great deal of help to not be a danger to others in the future. That's the compassionate route.

Almost zero governments will want to spend the money. Sadly, it's cheaper to keep them locked up.