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Juvenile Justice
Nathaniel Brazill was 13 when he murdered
his teacher. But should he have been sentenced as an adult?
By Felicia Wu
 "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time" was the
first phrase that rang in my head when I first heard about Nathaniel Brazill,
a 13-year-old boy who shot his teacher point blank in the head on the last day
of school on May 26th of 2000. I didn't have any sympathy for him at the time.
How could someone be so merciless towards taking a life? How could someone so
young as 13 take away a life? Then again, it's because he was only 13 when he
killed his teacher that the crime, although unforgivable, seems almost understandable.
When someone is that young, you can't expect that person to think
straight. We've all been there and done something that has made us look
back now and say, "WHAT was I thinking?" You know what I'm
talking about because all of us, regardless of the situation, have done
something stupid for no reason at all, at the prime of our
lives.
When we are young the world looks different to us than it
does when we get older. Most of the time, we just don't understand or
realize how the real world works and how we fit into it. We do things
that may not be the smartest thing in the world, but that's how we learn
and shape ourselves to the people we are today. We're always growing and
changing as people. I know for sure that in a couple of years, I'll
think back to when I was 17 (the age I am now) and think how stupid I
was at that time.
I was reading a newsmagazine a few weeks ago
that talked about and interviewed five different adults (ages of 18 -
21) who had murdered one or even more people when they were in their
teens (the youngest age a crime was committed was 14) and were faced
with an adult sentence. All five of the adults expressed so much remorse
and agony over what they had done that I actually felt sorry for them.
Most of them couldn't even imagine what their life would be like in the
future in the outside world. I'm not trying to say that every teen is
always this remorseful after they do a crime because that would be
untrue, but people do change, especially when one is as young as they
were when they did the crime.
Nathaniel Brazill was sentenced as
an adult. You can't sentence an adult and a teen the same way because
they're two totally different people. A teen is someone who's still
trying to figure out who they are and what they want to become, while
adults have already pretty much figured it out.
In most
situations, society treats teens differently than adults. Teens are
unable to get into R-rated movies because adults have deemed these films
for "mature audiences only." And teens aren't allowed to vote
until age 18 because people feel that since we're only teens, we don't
understand things and are unable to make clear decisions. It's ironic
how society doesn't expect much responsibility or maturity out of teens,
but once a crime is committed, all of those thoughts fly right out the
window and teens are suddenly treated like adults. How is it that
society can treat teens so differently because they are teens and
make their punishment the same as an adult even though they are
teens? Why the double standard?
Nathaniel got sentenced to 28
years in prison plus an additional two years in house arrest, which
means that by the time he gets out of prison, he'll be around 42 years
old. You can't expect a boy so young to go into prison for that long and
come out again leading a normal life. He won't have gotten through or
finished his high school education or have been with people his age. The
only thing he would have learned is how to survive in prison - and
prison and the rest of the world are two very different places. He won't
know how to live in the world because he would have forgotten from all
his years in prison. He'll be struggling to get a job and who knows,
might even go into crime just to try and survive. And although the
punishment is supposed to fit the crime, the punishment has become a
crime itself because it's taking another life along with the one that
has passed.
— Felicia Wu will be a senior at Albany High
School.
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