The law grants those who serve as judges in our legal system awesome power over the lives of others. But it does not confer upon those judges any supernatural powers.
The fact that Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren declared two 12-year-old girls charged with committing a horrific crime to be rational adults capable of making rational adult decisions does not make it so.
In fact, it shows just how ugly and irrational our legal system has become that it permits a judge to claim something that clearly isn’t true—that 12-year-olds are adults—so those children can be tried in adult court and punished with lengthy adult prison sentences.
It does nothing to diminish the horror of the crime the girls are accused of committing to state the truth—that even healthy minds of 12-year-olds are not yet fully developed to appreciate all the consequences of their actions.
And the more we know about the two 12-year-old girls charged with attempting to murder a sixth grade classmate, the less rational and less adult the crime becomes.
The girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, said they stabbed their friend 19 times to become disciples of a fictional horror story character named Slender Man. They then began walking to Nicolet National Forest, 200 miles away, where they believed they could live with the imaginary horror creature in his mansion.
All that sounds crazy because it is.
But what the Waukesha legal system intentionally has done ever since, particularly in the case of Geyser, the most seriously mentally ill of the two children, should constitute a crime itself.
Geyser has been diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia that includes hallucinations, hearing voices and delusions of communicating with Slender Man and Harry Potter characters. A psychiatrist testified her father suffered from the same mental illness as an adolescent and was hospitalized at least four times.
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The disease is incurable, but can be controlled with medication and treatment. That makes it all the more tragic and irresponsible that Judge Bohren and legal authorities have provided Geyser with absolutely no mental health treatment.
Instead, they’ve incarcerated her for more than a year in a West Bend juvenile facility without any mental health services.
Bohren refused a request from Geyser’s attorneys to move her to a Wauwatosa treatment center for girls. Mental health experts say that without treatment Geyser’s condition continues to deteriorate.
Children Treated Cruelly
In the hands of an insensitive judge, the criminal justice system becomes a blunt instrument. Its most brutal force can be incredibly destructive to the lives of young children who are mentally ill.
Unfortunately, in a sensational tabloid case drawing national and international headlines, judges and prosecutors basking in the spotlight are more concerned about posturing to show how tough they are rather than considering the consequences of their own actions.
One of the sadder sideshows to this case is an odd racial division that has emerged in public attitudes about how harshly these young girls should be treated within the criminal justice system.
African American leaders and others who have justifiably objected to courts treating young blacks accused of violent crimes as if they were feral animals undeserving of any human mercy have been just as heartless in demanding harsh, adult punishment for two suburban white children accused of the same crimes.
That’s totally opposed to the important message behind the growing national movement uniting all races to demand criminal justice reforms ending the enormous disparity in incarceration rates, sentencing policies and treatment of citizens by police based on race.
We don’t make any positive progress by starting to treat those who have benefitted from white privilege in the past just as cruelly and unjustly in the criminal justice system as we’ve always treated people of color.
We should be doing just the opposite. We should be moving toward a far more decent and humane criminal justice system that treats everyone with equality and human dignity. Our legal system should return offenders to our communities better than they were before they were removed, instead of worse.
That is especially true for children who have not yet had the opportunity to become whoever it is they are going to be as fully formed, rational adults.
There is something twisted about the notion that certain crimes by children are so extreme they are the acts of an adult. One could easily argue the reverse. Violent, life-threatening acts by an adult are the result of extremely immature, infantile thoughts and emotions.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled our most extreme legal punishment, the death penalty, should not apply to children and others with severely limited mental capacity.
None of us would ever want to be held legally accountable for all the bizarre, absurd and dangerous things we felt, thought and sometimes did as 12-year-olds, even as fairly sane ones.
