Georgia officials charge 14-year-old alleged school shooter as an adult
The school shooting this week in Georgia raises many questions about how the criminal justice system handles cases where minors commit capital crimes.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
How does the U.S. legal system handle a case where the alleged assailant in a violent crime is just 14 years old? That's at issue in this week's school shooting in Winder, Ga. NPR criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson joins us. Meg, thank you for being with us.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: The alleged shooter is 14, but he is being prosecuted in Georgia as an adult. How do officials make that determination?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So all 50 states allow children to be prosecuted as adults. Who decides, though, varies by state. Sometimes it's a prosecutor. Sometimes it's a judge. Sometimes it's based on state law. There's usually a minimum age. It's often 14 or 15 years old, but it also depends on the crime. So in Georgia, for instance, any child 13 or older charged with murder automatically ends up in adult court.
And experts that I spoke to say nearly all juveniles who commit school shootings across the country do end up being tried as adults. And that's because there's often intense pressure from the community, from parents, understandably, to hold these young people accountable for a lot of irreversible harm.
SIMON: Meg, what is the legal argument against trying juveniles as adults?
ANDERSON: So it's basically based in brain science. Our brains are not done developing until we're in our mid-20s. So children and teenagers, you know, they're more impulsive, less able to regulate their emotions, less able to think through the consequences of their actions. Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, says that can be really hard, though, to talk about in cases as violent and horrendous as a school shooting.
