Instead of telling you all about the 6 tests and a presentation I have next week, or the hideous headache that has deprived me of sanity and sleep, I’m going to go off in an entirely different direction. Basically I’m procrastinating. But passionately and stuff.

What I really want to talk about is this. Because reading it makes me mad at this country. You can click safely, it’s not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama, it’s about logic and fairness.

And children.

Twenty years ago, a 9 year old boy shot a 7 year old girl, with a rifle, out of his bedroom window. The little girl died.

It is, in no uncertain terms, a horrific and tragic situation. But, the way that our justice system handled it was equally horrific. That 9 year old boy was tried as an adult in court. That boy who was 7 years from driving and 9 years from being declared an adult by the government, was declared one in a court.

The reasoning was because he had lied when he was initially asked about what had happened and because he fell asleep during court hearings. They said that lying was truly an adult behavior. I call bullshit. My 8 year old cousin regularly tells his mother that he doesn’t know how to turn off the Wii. That lie is not an adult behavior, it’s a childish one. It’s the act of a kid who thinks that he can get a few more minutes of video gaming if he tells a lie. It shows a disconnect with reality, not a level of maturity on par with someone 10 years his senior. If lying is an adult behavior, than every four year old I’ve ever met should be getting driver’s licenses and be old enough to buy cigarettes soon.

Just recently an 11 year old boy shot and killed his father. And was tried as an adult.

As much as I try to consider this rationally and think about the need to incarcerate and rehabilitate all those who commit murders, I cannot understand how this is reasonable. That child is clearly not an adult in any way, shape or form. It is a child and should be treated as such.

Think about it this way- if a man had sex with an 11 year old girl, he would absolutely (and correctly) be charged with statutory rape, because that 11 year old is clearly not an adult. But if that same 11 year old child killed someone, they could be tried as an adult.

Is age dependent upon the situation? Are children only children as long as their mistakes are minor? Because it seems like we’re happy to label them as children until it suits us otherwise, until we become scared by something they do. To me it seems like this child, who did something truly horrible, deserves a chance to grow up. They deserve treatment. Do we really think that at age 11 there’s no chance that we can turn this life around? That because in the 5th grade they made a mistake, that they cannot be taught differently?

Children’s minds are painfully impressionable. They can be shaped, molded. And sending them to prison with real adults, is not the answer to a situation like this. Holding them to adult standards is not reasonable. They do not have the reasoning skills, nor the understanding of the world that adults do.

I’ve been milling over this article since Friday and the more I think about it, the more I am disappointed with the justice system and those who populate it. In our haste to punish for crimes, we forget that those who committed them are people too. And we forget to consider them when we set out to rectify their wrongs. You cannot punish every person in the same way and you can’t make a child equal to an adult. They simply aren’t the same.

I think if we all took a step back and considered that we’re talking about 9 and 11 year olds, we’d see the absolute insanity that was applied to the cases of these two children. Treating children as adults is not reasonable, nor responsible.

And as adults, it is our responsibility to be both.

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