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[Knightgale]

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-feige/30-years-for-a-12-year-ol_b_53225.html

Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents with a shotgun. He was 12 years old, stood 5 foot 2 and weighed 96 pounds. He had already been hospitalized for attempting suicide. Despite his age, size and psychiatric history, Christopher was tried as an adult and sentenced to 30 years in adult prison. Just last week, the South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed his conviction effectively ending his state-court bid for freedom or simply treatment as a juvenile.

Under South Carolina law, someone under the age of 14 is presumed to be incapable of forming the requisite intent to commit a crime. In this case the jury found that this presumption was rebutted despite the fact that the testimony established that Christopher had been taking Paxil when he went to live with his grandparents, but that when his grandmother took him to a physician to refill his prescription, he was offered free samples and a prescription for Zoloft instead.

The medication came in a brown paper bag with instructions scrawled on the outside. The tablets were adult strength--more than twice the appropriate dosage.

But whether or not it was the Zoloft, the question the Pittman case poses is: are we really willing to abandon a child at the age of 12, no matter what they've done?

In South Carolina, in order to transfer jurisdiction from the family court to a court of general jurisdiction, a court must find that such a transfer is in the best interests of both the child and the community. (There are at least 8 factors that go into this determination.) In Christopher's case, in order to find that being prosecuted as an adult and incarcerated for 30 years was actually in his best interest, the state had to show, and the court had to find that he was, essentially beyond rehabilitation. They also had to find that the community would be safer with Christopher sentenced as an adult.

Both positions are wrong.

The truth is, treating kids harshly doesn't work as a deterrent. In an Idaho study of arrest rates after the passage of a harsh law mandating the transfer of certain crimes to adult court, Eric Jensen and Linda Metsger found no evidence of a deterrent effect. In fact when they compared juvenile crime in Idaho to demographically similar neighboring states, they found that the targeted crimes actually increased in Idaho while decreasing in Montana and Wyoming. Moreover, as a 1996 Florida study showed, treating kids as adults is likely to increase not decrease recidivism rates. The reality is, throwing kids into the adult penal system just doesn't make us safer.

And, of course, there is something about Christopher's sentence that should offend our moral dignity. We love and pamper kids with terrible childhood diseases even when their prognosis is terribly bleak. We create schools and homes for the mentally ill and mentally retarded, we take the protection of the weak and impaired among us as a social and moral imperative. The religious among us often believe that it is never too late to repent and change one's life. And yet when confronted by a child accused of murder, all of these instincts and inclinations seem to flee in the face of this unforgivable crime. When we look into the eyes of a child like Christopher all of our better impulses go out the window.

The criminal justice system failed Christopher Pittman as it has failed thousands of juvenile offenders across the country.

Continuing to punish little kids as if they were adults may appeal to our sterner sensibilities or may even seem like good policy, but even the most cursory scrutiny reveals that children remain different and need to be dealt with differently. It's high time to repeal the raft of laws that send kids as young as Christopher into the adult system.

We've already turned our backs on too many far too many kids.
It's high time turn around and do what we can do to save them and in doing so, ourselves.
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http://www.kurtdanysh.com
http://www.whoopassforjustice.org
http://justicewinds.blogspot.com

[Knightgale]

http://www.justiceseekers.com/index.cfm?menuitemid=220

Pittman case headed to U.S. Supreme Court

The University of Texas Law School Supreme Court clinic, with additioinal help from LBJ school, have agreed to join our team in presenting Christopher's case to the High Court.
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This case is far from over, advocates the world over are still watching and supporting this child. Under the cirucumstances of being FORCED to take anti depressants when he was a mere 12 yrs old, the officials have literally destroyed all of his childhood, and still facing 30 yrs with NO chance of parole, unless the U.S. Supreme court overturns this sentencing, which the SC Supreme court DENIED HIS APPEAL.
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http://www.kurtdanysh.com
http://www.whoopassforjustice.org
http://justicewinds.blogspot.com

[Knightgale]

A major injustice in South Carolina
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
DANIEL LEDDY

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- On June 8, 1964, Gerald Gault, 15, was charged with making an obscene phone call to a neighbor. That minor adolescence prank would eventually lead to the most important decision ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court on the rights of young offenders.

Declaring that "under our Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court," the Supreme Court held that certain basic rights enjoyed by adult criminal defendants must also be accorded to youngsters facing hearings in the nation's juvenile courts.

Now, a terribly sad case that I first wrote about in February, 2005, could produce the most significant decision affecting juvenile rights since the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Gault. The case, Pittman v. South Carolina, is the perfect vehicle for the court to rescue a juvenile justice system hijacked by pandering politicians, exploited by politically ambitious prosecutors, and sacrificed by politically conscious judges.

Christopher Pittman was a little boy -- barely 5 feet tall and weighing under 100 pounds -- whom life hadn't treated very well. After a relentlessly chaotic home environment led him to attempt suicide, Christopher was admitted to a psychiatric facility and eventually prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant generally not recommended for children.

It seemed that the boy finally caught a break when he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents, two people whom he dearly loved, in South Carolina. Unfortunately, however, nobody was monitoring his intake of Zoloft.

On Nov. 28, 2001, in an act light-years removed from the real Christopher Pittman, the boy shot and killed both of his grandparents while they were sleeping. Shortly thereafter, alone and terrified, Christopher was interrogated by police who promptly extracted a confession from him.

Although Christopher's case obviously belonged in the Family Court where he could have gotten the help that he so desperately needed, prosecutors insisted on trying the 12 year-old as an adult.

In an act of rank cowardice, Circuit Court Judge Daniel Pieper allowed the ridiculous spectacle to proceed. After an intolerably long three years during which he was held without bail, Christopher, now looking significantly older and more mature, was finally brought to trial.

Before what was laughably empanelled as a jury of the young defendant's peers, two highly qualified mental health experts testified that Christopher was "involuntarily intoxicated" on Zoloft and exhibiting psychotic features at the time of the killings.

MANDATORY MADNESS

Nevertheless, the jury convicted Christopher of two counts of murder and Pieper imposed South Carolina's mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years.

Last June, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld both the conviction and the sentence. Thus, for something that he did when he was a suicidal, depressed, improperly medicated 12 year-old child, Christopher is now sitting in an adult prison.

The effort to wrest Christopher from South Carolina's version of Hades now moves to the U.S. Supreme Court where an application for review is being filed. I am supporting that effort as an amicus curiae or friend of the court along with H. Ted Rubin, a retired judge of the Denver Juvenile Court, and Jeanne Meurer, a district court judge in Austin, Texas.

My interest and experience in juvenile law spans my entire legal career. As an attorney, I defended kids charged with virtually every crime on the books, including murder. As a family court judge, I presided over hundreds of juvenile cases, many of which involved very serious charges.

I know first hand that the great majority of kids, including those who have done some really bad things, can be rehabilitated if accorded the multifaceted remedial services that only juvenile courts can provide. I also know that shipping redeemable children to adult prisons is not only exceedingly cruel but counterproductive because it ensures that they will emerge as cynical, hardened criminals.

If the application for review is accepted, the Pittman case will give the U.S. Supreme Court a historic opportunity to declare that subjecting juveniles to mandatory jail terms in adult prisons violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. This because it deprives trial judges of the opportunity to evaluate the child's rehabilitative potential in light of his age and level of maturity.

The case also offers the court the chance to rule once and for all that juveniles, particularly those as young as Christopher, are incapable of waiving their Miranda rights in the absence of a parent, guardian, or attorney to advise them.

Several people who maintain contact with Christopher have told me that he is a remarkably caring, compassionate kid who, not surprisingly, is a model prisoner.

He could, of course, just as easily be a model citizen, but South Carolina doesn't care about that. Neither do most other states these days. That's why it's important that the U.S. Supreme Court seize the opportunity to drill it into their skulls.

Daniel Leddy's On The Law column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Op-Ed Page.
http://www.silive.com/columnists/ledd/index.ssf?/base/opinion/120221641376780.xml&coll=1&thispage=1
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http://www.kurtdanysh.com
http://www.whoopassforjustice.org
http://justicewinds.blogspot.com