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.
He can study necromancy for the rest of his life, and attempt to raise his victim from the grave. That’s his right. If he accomplishes it, we can talk about clemency.
His right to seek redemption isn’t being infringed upon by locking him up permanently. It is the permanence of the death he caused that is denying him redemption.
One comment earlier you seemed to have accepted saving a life as possible repayment for a taken life, now you don’t, any more. What happened?
I commented on it, but I never accepted your premise that saving lives counts toward redemption. The reason why is simple: Whatever future potential you envision this kid having, you must also give to the kid he killed. Balancing the number of potential future lives the murderer saves vs the same number of potential lives lost by killing his victim, this kid is always going to be one life short of redemption.
Edit:
Forgot to comment on this earlier:
No, by locking him up forever, you greatly improve the odds that he won’t kill again. He is free to explore the development of his personality within the context of having his behavior directly supervised for the rest of his life.
No, he isn’t. Literally psychology 101. You’re dooming him, how are you going to redeem yourself from that? You’ll need, by your own argument, do something that benefits him, not others, or the collective.
He doomed himself. I don’t owe him a thing. If I owe anyone anything, it is his victim, not him. If I do owe his victim, locking up his killer for the rest of his life would be my pathway toward redemption.
You locked him up and threw away the key. That is your action, directly affecting his psychology, directly harming him. You may be the judge, the legislator, the juror, the jailer, the voter. You have to account for it.
You justify locking him up by protecting others, but how do you justify the harm you’re inflicting?
Then, you’re assuming agency on his part. Choice. The kid is 15 FFS, go back in your own life, consider how much, at that age, it was yours, or that of the environment. You also need to argue that he was the reason he killed, and not his environment. Humans don’t generally kill other humans, they also don’t grow up to do so, something must’ve happened to him and I very much doubt it was his fault.
What basis do you have for presuming his incompetence?
The fact that he was unsupervised in public tells me he should be assumed to understand the concepts of right and wrong.
Now I don’t know where you’re from but around here four year olds are unsupervised in public. It’s also not about the concept, but about what is considered right and what’s wrong, and the self-control to not act on an overwhelming impulse from the unconscious. May I remind you that the frontal cortex, that which gives us the ability to pause and reconsider, is not fully developed at his age.
You have no idea what his psychology looks like, yet you’re condemning him, and thousands more, by your principles. Unseen, unheard, and yep that – unseen, unheard – is one of the possible depth-psychological reasons why kids lash out like that. Not only do you, self-righteously, condemn him, you also might have created him by the habitual way in which you regard – or rather don’t regard – people.
I suspect you misspoke. 4-year-olds require 24/7 supervision from a parent, guardian, or other caregiver in public or private. Failure to continuously supervise a 4-year-old you are responsible for is a chargeable offense.
It is about the capacity to understand right and wrong about a given act. Children much younger than 15 are expected to understand the general legal and moral implications of murder.
Untrue. I know he was subjected to numerous hearings and evaluations to determine his competency. He was found to not have sufficiently diminished capacity to excuse or mitigate his actions.