What happened to Luis Ramirez should never happen to anyone of any color at any time anywhere. It was a tragedy of the worst kind. It broke my heart when I read about the 25-year-old illegal immigrant who was allegedly beaten to death by teenagers Brandon Piekarski,16, and Colin Walsh, 17. Another teen, Derrick Donchak, 18, was charged with aggravated assault in the killing, along with ethnic intimidation and other counts, including providing liquor to the other boys the night of the confrontation. All were members of the local high school football team. Donchak was their quarterback. Now, the three boys look to spend the rest of their lives in the American prison system for something they did while they were children.
What they’re accused of doing is horrific. This young man that was murdered lost his life for all the wrong reasons. Because his skin was dark. He was not a citizen of this country. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong punks.
If these boys did what they’re accused of doing, if they racially taunted Luis Ramirez, and then beat him to death, they should be punished severely, no mistake about it. They took the valuable life of another. They have to learn from their mistakes.
But at the same time, one day they should also be given the chance to demonstrate an ability to rehabilitate. They must be allowed at least an opportunity to escape their tiny confines of brutality and violence, get their lives back together, and become productive citizens, something they were incapable of doing in adolescence. But here in America, children who are convicted of committing serious crimes often end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. The United States is the only country in the world that sentences its children to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
There are 2,484 of them – American prisoners – who were sentenced as juveniles and who will never be considered for release from an adult prison again. Nor will they ever have an opportunity to demonstrate that they have been rehabilitated.
California has nearly 300 such cases. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, leads the country with 444, nearly one-fifth of the national total. That’s why Piekarsky, Walsh, and Donchak appear to be in such serious trouble. The crimes they’re charged with took place in a small coal-mining town called Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Should the prosecuting agency follow the national trend, these boys could be as good as gone. For life.
However, hope – something that is generally nonexistent to a child sentenced to prison for the rest of his life – might be on the way. The Judiciary Committee of the Pennsylvania Senate began holding hearings today in an effort to reeaxime this practice in light of psychological and developmental research, international standards, and national trends to the contrary.
You see, legally speaking, the medical issue is that brain-development research has confirmed what psychologists and others have been saying for many years – that the key parts of the brain associated with judgment and decision-making remain undeveloped throughout adolescence, meaning that children, as a group, must be considered legally less culpable than adults.
The areas in the brain responsible for controlling impulse behavior are the last to mature, which means children find themselves far more susceptible to peer pressure than do their adult counterparts. This results in a diminished capacity to recognize the long-term consequences of their actions. And it also means kids are more capable of rehabilitation.
As their brains evolve and change, kids have more potential for growth and reform. And isn’t that really the bottom line of what a civilized society should be about? We don’t have to lock them up and throw away the key forever. Some children possess an amazing capacity to be able to learn from their mistakes.
Besides, many who were children when they began serving these Draconian sentences were sentenced under felony-murder statutes, where they didn’t mean to kill anyone, but someone was in fact killed during the commission of a less serious offense. Others, who weren’t directly responsible for the killing, were convicted under theories of accomplice liability.
By eliminating such sentences for children, an opportunity to demonstrate their growth, development, and rehabilitation could be created. It would also give the child, and in many cases, his family and community, something far more important than social justice: Hope. A hope, however slim, that things could change. Right now, there’s very little hope for a child who knows he or she is going to spend the rest of their life in prison.
