What gets me is his face. Nathaniel Abraham's face is still round like a child's -- part fearful, part rebellious but mostly unsure. He is, after all, only 13, and there's plenty to be unsure about at that age: hormones, homework, blemishes, electronic game moves, girls, FUBU jeans vs. cargo pants.
But as Nathaniel sits in a Michigan courtroom, he has something else to think about: possibly spending the rest of his life in prison.When he was 11, Nathaniel fired a stolen .22-caliber rifle through some trees, hitting and killing 18-year-old Ronnie Greene.
Nathaniel already had a criminal record by then. His defenders say he's deeply troubled and had the reasoning abilities of a 6-year-old at the time. It was a too-familiar story of a mother seeking help, but being turned away.
He said the death was an accident. Prosecutors said he had bragged to a girl that he was going to kill someone. Either way, instead of getting help, he got to be the youngest child to be charged with murder as an adult in Michigan and possibly in modern America. A recent Michigan law removed any minimum age for being tried as an adult. On Tuesday, a jury convicted Nathaniel of murder in the second degree.
These crimes are real - horrific and permanent. We've got children killing children in places like high schools, where we send our kids each day, trusting they'll be safe. Still, though we're supposed to, I don't feel any safer that child offenders are being treated as adults.
We're supposed to feel safer that a 13-year-old could be unleashed on the sexual predators, the 200-plus-pound body builders and the multiple felons.
We're supposed to feel safer that that is the fate also awaiting Kip Kinkel, who at 15, severely disturbed and hearing voices in his head, went on a shooting spree and got 112 years in adult prison.
We're even supposed to sleep easier now that felony charges have been slapped on three of the six expelled students involved in a Decatur, Ill., high school fistfight.
So why do I feel despairing instead?
I won't sit here and tell you youth crime is no big deal. The juvenile violent-crime arrest rate shot up by 75 percent between 1985 and 1994. We know we're dealing with some kids who desperately need help -- kids who were abused or neglected, denied a fighting chance from the start, or whose learning deficits were never addressed so they were left to fail. Even kids who went wrong despite good parents.
But more and more, we've stopped trying to fix them, slapping hard time on them instead, often after failing to intervene in time to prevent tragedies. More than 11,000 children are in prisons and other long-term adult correctional facilities.
They're not adults. They lack adult maturity and reasoning abilities. That is why, for a century now, we've had a separate juvenile-justice system, aimed at rehabilitation.
Sending a kid to prison for life for something he did before age 18 violates internationally agreed-upon standards. And anyway, there's no evidence trying kids as adults is keeping society safer. David L. Myers of the University of Maryland, who recently looked at 557 violent juvenile offenders who were transferred to adult court in Pennsylvania, found that trying them as adults actually increased their crime rate.
Not that the juvenile system isn't sometimes overzealous, too.
The other little face splashed around the news lately is that of blond, smiling Raoul Wuthrich, an 11-year-old Swiss-American boy who was plucked at age 10 by authorities from his Colorado house one night, handcuffed and held in juvenile detention for more than six weeks after a neighbor reported seeing him get sexual with his 5-year-old half-sister.
Now obviously, if that happened, this is a kid and a family that needs help. It was necessary to remove one child from the home, either to live with family members or in foster care. If this turns out to have been a deliberate act, he deserves some punishment, and the girl needs protection. But because officials got overzealous before even hearing the case, they got nowhere. He was released last week, when a judge ruled his right to a speedy trial was violated. So now he's back home, nothing achieved.
The catalog of young faces burns an image into your mind: A self-assured 11-year-old Raoul Wuthrich, a despondent 17-year-old Kip Kinkel, a quizzical 13-year-old Nathaniel Abraham, together looking eerily like the kids next door. Time was when childhood, at least, was about hope. When did we start giving up?
Rekha Basu can be reached by e-mail at basur@news.dmreg.com