HOW HE SEES IT First we protect, then we punish

By ISSAC J. BAILEY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
It doesn't make sense how we treat the young in the criminal-justice system. When it is expedient or makes for a good sound bite, we treat them as we should: like the children they are.
We make it our business to protect them from predators, through publicly disseminated sexual-criminal lists and by empowering the Department of Social Services to remove them from unfit homes. We mandate they ride in state-approved safety devices while passengers in cars. We make it difficult for them to view R-rated movies and rail against the prevalence of violent video games. We even protect them from themselves.
Through legislation, we've decided their body isn't their own. They can't get an abortion without special permission, can't decide for themselves when they are ready to have sex or ingest alcohol or smoke cigarettes or drive.
We say they aren't ready, that they have neither the life experience nor full emotional development to understand the gravity of life-altering choices. And we're right. An impenetrable wall between childhood and adulthood needs to exist.
But we still sentence the Christopher Pittmans of the world to a 30-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. Pittman is the 15-year-old at the heart of the so-called Zoloft case.
Guilty verdict
The defense argued the medicine affected his mental capacities to the point that he should not have been held accountable for shooting his grandparents to death. The jury didn't buy that argument and found him guilty of murder.
Science hasn't yet definitively answered when or if environmental and other conditions momentarily rob us of free will, meaning such a ruling is logical. We must assume people are in control of their actions until convincing evidence proves otherwise.
But I thought it was obvious children are at a disadvantage when navigating the responsibility of free will, given that they are saddled with the curious combination of a not-yet-developed brain and overactive hormones. Pittman was 12, not even a teenager, when he committed his crimes.
Twelve.
Seems we've decided the impenetrable wall between childhood and adulthood should never be breached, no matter how mature the youngster -- except when we want to punish them longer after they expose, through horrific acts, that we failed to protect them.
It doesn't make sense.
X Issac J. Bailey is a columnist for the Myrtle Beach, S.C., Sun News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.