By Ryan Deal ’16

A sickening story emerging from a Minnesota forest last year grabbed headlines across the globe. Two twelve-year old girls, in an attempt to impress Slender Man, a fictional character created on the website Creepypasta, led their friend into the woods and stabbed her 17 times in an attempt to kill her. The two girls, who are just now standing trial in an adult court for attempted murder (the victim miraculously survived), are well within the age limit to be tried in a juvenile court, so why are they not?

Adolescence is a time when one experiences loads of pressure and anxiety, often making missteps, some worse than others. However, regardless of whether the action was disturbing (murder) or fairly mundane (underage drinking), teenagers commonly have believed that they cannot experience a penalty equivalent to that of an adults. This law has been seemingly entrenched in the justice system for years, as evidenced by the presence of a juvenile court. However, it’s a law that is fading more and more into irrelevance. According to the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, roughly 250,000 youth are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults annually in the United States.

The juvenile court system exists to take severely troubled minors and place them in rehabilitation institutions so that they can eventually live functional and law-abiding lives. By ignoring this process for minors and thrusting them right into adult court, the focus shifts from helping the minor sort through their issues to punishing them for what they have done. Punishment is for adults who should know better, not for minors who desperately need specialized, professional treatment.

According to a study published in the journal Law and Human Behavior, “youths aged 15 and younger performed more poorly [in the study] than young adults, with a greater proportion manifesting a level of impairment consistent with those found incompetent to stand trial.” If an underage minor is not even able to match the intellect of an adult who would not be able to stand trial, then why does the adult court let them?

The way in which the courts handle cases involving minors cannot be mutually exclusive, they must go all-in on one side. Either abolish the presence of juvenile courts and create a single adult court system, thus making all crimes an adult crime, or start abiding by the age limit set so many decades ago and actually begin charging all minors as minors. It is not up to a judge to decide which juvenile crimes should or should not be punished severely.