Race not a factor in harsh sentence

James Goins and Chad Barnette, two 17-year-olds who brutally beat an 83-year-old man and left him for dead, have been sentenced to more than 85 years in prison. Yes, that is harsh punishment for two juveniles -- they were tried as adults -- but it can be justified.
And it is patently unfair for anyone to accuse Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court of being a racist. He isn't.
The crimes that Goins and Barnette committed -- in addition to forever destroying William Sovak's life, they also broke into the home of Louis and Elizabeth Luchisan and beat and robbed them -- demanded the maximum penalty.
As Judge Krichbaum told the defendants, "I can't feel any sympathy for you. I can't feel anything but contempt for what you've done." Our sentiments exactly.
When innocent people in the security of their own homes (or so they thought) are preyed upon by thugs who demonstrate a disturbing lack of humanity and morality, the law must intervene.
While we can understand the despair of Goins' and Barnette's relatives upon realizing that these two young men have thrown away their lives, we aren't willing to buy into the argument that what they did should be measured against what they could have done.
Murder: Here's what Martin Walker, Goins' uncle, had to say about the sentence: "These boys didn't even kill nobody and they got that much time. That's a lot of time. It's not fair the way [the courts] treat young black kids." Is Walker suggesting that murder is the only crime for which the full weight of the law must be brought to bear? We hope not. What Goins and Barnette did to Sovak and the Luchisans was inhumane.
Walker and Goins' mother, Sheila Spivey, believe the sentence was racially motivated because the defendants are black and the victims are white.
Such scapegoating is not only unfair, it is counterproductive in a community that is trying to reverse the high-crime trend of the last several years. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that Youngstown had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the nation.
Many of the perpetrators of violent crimes in the city are young people who are influenced, more often than not, by their peers. The only way this cycle of violence can be broken is by demonstrating that crime does not pay.
That clearly was the message Judge Krichbaum delivered when he sentenced James Goins and Chad Barnette to more than eight decades behind bars. The judge deserves to be praised, not vilified.