Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
He doomed himself. I don’t owe him a thing. If I owe anyone anything, it is his victim, not him. If I do owe his victim, locking up his killer for the rest of his life would be my pathway toward redemption.
You locked him up and threw away the key. That is your action, directly affecting his psychology, directly harming him. You may be the judge, the legislator, the juror, the jailer, the voter. You have to account for it.
You justify locking him up by protecting others, but how do you justify the harm you’re inflicting?
Then, you’re assuming agency on his part. Choice. The kid is 15 FFS, go back in your own life, consider how much, at that age, it was yours, or that of the environment. You also need to argue that he was the reason he killed, and not his environment. Humans don’t generally kill other humans, they also don’t grow up to do so, something must’ve happened to him and I very much doubt it was his fault.
What basis do you have for presuming his incompetence?
The fact that he was unsupervised in public tells me he should be assumed to understand the concepts of right and wrong.
Now I don’t know where you’re from but around here four year olds are unsupervised in public. It’s also not about the concept, but about what is considered right and what’s wrong, and the self-control to not act on an overwhelming impulse from the unconscious. May I remind you that the frontal cortex, that which gives us the ability to pause and reconsider, is not fully developed at his age.
You have no idea what his psychology looks like, yet you’re condemning him, and thousands more, by your principles. Unseen, unheard, and yep that – unseen, unheard – is one of the possible depth-psychological reasons why kids lash out like that. Not only do you, self-righteously, condemn him, you also might have created him by the habitual way in which you regard – or rather don’t regard – people.