Hey y’all!

Earlier this week a 15-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister were involved in a shooting at their rural Florida home. The older girl fatally shot her brother while he slept.

My first question when reading about this was, where are the parents? I bet you are wondering, too. Well the father is a truck driver who had to work from Sunday until Tuesday. That makes sense, so then where was the mother? She apparently went with her husband, leaving their 16-year-old son in charge of the household. I’m sorry, that doesn’t sound like good parenting to begin with. I would not let my children be supervised by my 16-year-old son, I would have a babysitter come or maybe only one parent should’ve gone. Perhaps the one with the job? I don’t see why the mom felt the need to leave her children. Not only did these parents decide to leave their son in charge of these girls, but also their three-year-old daughter. That’s a lot of responsibility for a teenager, and not the best idea on the parents’ part.

Reports claim that the boy locked his 15-year-old sister in her room and then fell asleep. The girl talked her 11-year-old sister into letting her out as he slept. Once freed from her room she headed into her parents’ bedroom where she knew they kept a gun; however, this young girl did not just walk through the door into the parents’ bedroom, oh no, she had to go to the outside of the house with a knife and remove the air conditioning unit that was installed in the bedroom window in order to get in, as they apparently had locked their bedroom door before they left.

The girl headed straight to the location where her parents kept their pistol, loaded it, and went into the room where her brother slept, pulling the trigger. The scary part is that the 15 year old knew what she was doing and told her 11-year-old sister to hide in a closet before she killed their brother.  After shooting her brother she buried her head in a pillow before returning to the living room to find her three-year-old sister trying to wake up her dead brother. Upon seeing this, the two older girls fled the house, leaving the three year old to fend for herself next to their dead brother. It was only after the 11 year old called a friend for a ride that police were able to find the girls.

The parents were notified and have admitted to locking up the 15 year old for up to 20 consecutive days in her bedroom for “misbehaving.” Through police reports and interviews it has also been discovered that the 15 year old had a single blanket and a bucket to use the bathroom when she was locked up.

Things make a bit more sense when you realize how neglectful and irresponsible the parents were. It’s hard to know what possibly happened to lead to being locked in the bedroom. Did the brother beat his sister before locking her in her bedroom? She could have just snapped and felt like she needed to protect herself and her siblings. Although I understand that, I feel like it was also premeditated. She knew where the gun was located, that it needed to be loaded, and to protect her little sister from seeing what was about to happen.

The 15- and 11-year-old girls are being held at a juvenile detention center while a prosecutor decides whether they should be tried as adults or not. The parents are also facing charges of child neglect and failing to supervise.

Allison Dawson

Allison Dawson was born in Germany and raised in Mississippi and Texas. A graduate of Texas Tech University and Arizona State University, she’s currently dedicating her life to studying for the LSAT. Twitter junkie. Conservative. Get in touch with Allison at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Young Florida Sisters Held in Fatal Shooting of Older Brother appeared first on Law Street.

There are few topics as loaded in the American consciousness right now as the crime of rape. The Department of Education launched a massive investigation into the way that universities and colleges handle rape allegations, and hashtags like #YesAllWomen and #BeenRapedNeverReported have led to raw, powerful discussions on social media. However, one of the most immediate issues when it comes to dealing with rape in this nation is the complicated way in which we prosecute it. The Washington State Supreme Court just made a ruling that sheds light into the difficulty that comes with trying a rape case.

There are obviously a lot of moving parts when it comes to rape prosecution — social pressures, lack of reporting, and institutionalized victim-blaming to name just a few. All of these are essential factors that affect every step of a rape prosecution, and that needs to be kept in mind. But on the most basic level, prosecuting rape is complicated because of one simple question that we still haven’t figured out: who needs to prove what?

Think of a murder case. The prosecution has to prove that the defendant murdered the victim. Because of the nature of that crime, there’s no paranoia about false accusations the way there is with a rape case. Very few people argue about what the victim was wearing, or whether they invited someone over, or whether they were drinking matter at all. There’s no claim that the victim didn’t make it clear enough that they didn’t want to be murdered. There’s no real consent argument to make, except for possibly in a doctor-assisted suicide case, but those are rare outliers, not a normal consideration. We as a people know that being murdered is horrible, and the person who commits the murder is in the wrong. In order to make sure that the right person receives justice,however, affirmative defenses do exist — the most well-known probably being self-defense or insanity. This is not to say that murder cases are straightforward, but rather that the idea of “murder” and how to deal with it in a court is significantly more understood and accepted.

Compare that to a rape case. Like I said, there are all the other issues to contend with first — lack of investigation, lack of reporting, intense cultural shame. For all of those reasons, and many others, the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) estimates that for every 100 rapes, only 46 are reported to the police, and only nine of those even get a day in court. Those abysmal statistics aside, when the case makes it to court there are even more compounded issues.

One of the big problems that we can’t seem to move past is the mere concept that rape can involve an act that in another context is not a crime. It’s different than other violent crimes in that way; no one can make that argument about murder or robbery. The inability to grasp that concept is what has led to national paranoia over false accusations and a perverted fascination about the actions of the victim.

And that brings us to the prosecution of rape — consent is so hard to define and prove that it makes even the ability to prosecute rape messy. A recent case in Washington highlights the issue. The State Supreme Court overturned a ruling that placed the burden on the defendant to prove consent in a rape case. This was a 1975 decision that made it so that the prosecution didn’t have to focus so much on proving there was a lack of consent, but rather the defendant had to show that there was consent. This protected the victim from unfair and inappropriate scrutiny. As Justice Susan Owens put it in her dissent:

In 1975, the legislature took an important step toward justice for rape victims when it modified the laws to focus on the conduct of the perpetrator and not the victim…. Not only does the majority’s decision invalidate years of work undertaken to properly refocus our rape law, but it also has serious implications for victims of an already underreported type of crime.

A move toward providing the most just outcomes whenever possible should be applauded. But within the context of how difficult it already is to prove a rape case and the horrible way our society usually deals with rape, it’s tough to imagine that this decision truly did that. There’s a lot that needs to happen to ensure that our justice system fairly deals with rape and sexual assault, and to be fair a lot of it, such as working to remove the stigma and societal judgment about rape, isn’t even really possible for the judiciary to do. That being said, this step backward in Washington has a lot of potential to be dangerous. There’s no perfect answer yet for how to best prosecute rape, but Washington’s step backward can’t be it.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Washington Courts Turn Back the Clock on Rape Prosecution appeared first on Law Street.

Justin Ross Harris was indicted on September 4 by a grand jury on eight counts for the murder of his 22-month-old son, who was left in a hot car. The public anxiously waited for this verdict after Harris became public enemy number one after the incident in June. Cobb County District Attorney Vic Reynolds stated that he will decide over the next three weeks whether to seek a mandatory life sentence or the death penalty in this case. If Reynolds does seek the death penalty, it will be for the malice murder charge, which alleges that Harris, who has claimed his son’s death was an accident, premeditated the child’s killing.

There has been much debate over the outcome and potential sentence of punishment that Mr. Harris will receive. Some believe these charges are way too severe, considering there may still be a possibility that the death of Harris’ young son was in fact an accident. In my opinion, this all comes down to just how ethical the death penalty really is? The death of a 22-month-old baby is tragic, and what is even more heartbreaking is that this seems to be becoming the norm. I was reading the news today, and several newspapers have created sections in which ‘hot car baby deaths’ are featured. It is clear that enforcing the death penalty as a deterrent just does not work.

In the twenty-first century, I honestly believe if we were to live by the saying ‘an eye for an eye’ we would be living in chaos. In order to lead by example, as a country that punishes individuals who commit heinous crimes, we should rise above just killing them off by an injection. It costs more money to keep an individual on death row than it does to place them in prison on a life sentence. An eye for an eye means that equal amount of suffering should be received, and I ask you, do you really think a quick lethal injection can compare to some of the horrific murders and rapes these victims suffer? Would it not make more sense to sentence these individuals to life sentences in prison, forcing them to acknowledge what they have done, while being punished by depriving them of any normal life they once had? What I think a lot of people fail to understand is that although these individuals can be sentenced to death row, they will spend years awaiting their actual death while money is wasted on them sitting in a cell.

With ironic timing, after three decades on death row, this week 50-year-old Henry McCollum and his brother were released from prison in North Carolina due to DNA evidence after serving a sentence for the rape and murder of a female in 1983. As expected, social media jumped at the chance to voice their opinions on this case, and the death penalty in general. Many believe that if someone commits such a heinous crime they should also suffer, whereas others argue that killing them via the death penalty is the easy way out. I have done a lot of research in the use of DNA to exonerate individuals. The Innocence Project is an organization that dedicates itself to cases exactly like this in the hope of overturning wrongful convictions. The flaw with the death penalty is the fact that in most cases, with an absence of evidence or lack of investigative material, it is close to impossible to be 100 percent sure of conviction. The risk that an individual can be sentenced to death, and then be proven innocent is way too high to warrant any ethical justification for this form of punishment.

As a country that bases itself on a constitution that protects the rights of the people and forbids cruel and unusual punishment, I struggle to see how sentencing someone to die by lethal injection for a crime that cannot be supported with 100 percent guaranteed proof is not in itself a contradiction of what we stand for. By sentencing Harris to death, I do not see how that can compare to the suffering of a young baby in a hot car. It is controversial to compare the suffering of ways to die for both the victim and the perpetrator, but I actually think the death penalty can sometimes be an easy way out.

Justice for victims who have lost their lives due to crime demands that their perpetrators be punished and made to understand and take responsibility for their actions. I am still unsure about where I stand in terms of rehabilitation for these types of criminals, but I genuinely feel like (and for this you can blame my criminology background and psycho analytic personality) if we do not try to understand why these things happen and why people do the things they do, we will not be able to prevent any harm done to us in the future, and more importantly to the next generation that will live in this exact same era of punishment.

—

Hannah Kaye (@HannahSKaye) is originally from London, now living in New York. Recently graduated with an MA in criminal justice from John Jay College. Strong contenders for things she is most passionate about are bagels and cupcakes.

Featured image courtesy of [Luigi Caterino via Flickr]

Hannah Kaye

Hannah Kaye is originally from London, now living in New York. Recently graduated with an MA in criminal justice from John Jay College. Strong contenders for things she is most passionate about are bagels and cupcakes. Contact Hannah at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Death Penalty is the Easy Way Out appeared first on Law Street.