To Prosecute or Not to Prosecute?

I recently read an article about a ten year old girl who recently died after a fight with another one of her elementary school classmates.  Joanna Ramos, died after trauma to the head during a pre-planned fight in the alleyway behind her school.  This appears to be just another report on a killing, but the problem with this case is that the mother of the ten year old was extremely un-happy to find out that the girl who killed her daughter was not prosecuted, and rightly so.  First of all the most disturbing thing about this report is the fact that the young girls involved were only ten and eleven years old!  It is believed that the girls were fighting over a boy, which is a mute point, but my issue is how can these girls even get the chance to have this fight?  In an elementary school, students should be escorted inside at the beginning of school and escorted out at the end of school so that at all times during the day there is a teacher available to watch them.  I know at my school if a fight breaks out it is literally taken under control in about thirty seconds or less, I don't think I've ever seen one become a full fledged fight.  So how can an elementary school, with students who are obviously so much younger than I am have less supervision than I do?  How can our education system be considered good if students don't even have enough supervision to not get into fatal fights with each other? There should have been a teacher around, and there is no excuse on the school's part for what happened.  This event should have not lasted long enough to do enough damage to kill a child, or even have happened in the first place.  The second issue is obviously with the problem that the young girl was not prosecuted.  Now I understand that she is eleven, and people who oppose my argument are going to say how are you going to punish an eleven year old?  Isn't the fact that she unintentionally killed another student enough punishment?  The thing is both students were at fault and sadly enough one of them already experienced the consequences of their decisions.  They meant to harm each other, that was decided when they planned their little fight.  But the child who killed Joanna needs to at least be charged as a minor.  Even if the killing itself was unintentional, harming Joanna was not and something should be done as punishment.  I think this shows a fault in our justice system.  That we don't have ways to take care of situations like this, that we just let them go when the conclusion is hard to reach because of age or what have you.  If the child is old enough to get into that kind of a fight, then they are old enough to receive the consequences of that.  Now I'm not saying they should be thrown in jail like they do with adults, I'm just saying something should have been done.  What if that was your child?  Wouldn't you like to know that we have a government that set up a justice system that would punish (and of course judge the punishment based on the circumstances) the person who brought harm to your child?  I know I would.

"Lesser of Two Evils" Editorial Review

After reading Carrie Hicks editorial Lesser of Two Evils, I can say that we come close to sharing almost identical political views because of the fact that I agree with all of her opinions on the political issues discussed in this blog.  I would like to see where she got her information from that she used to back her opinions, particularly for the quote she gives from Santorum. But I will say that it seems that for the most part her conclusions were drawn from an overall view of the subject as a opposed to finite details. This means that the information she supported her opinions with could have been past knowledge or tidbits she has picked up as she's watched the elections.  This shows that in her case citing her sources may not have been necessary, so the lack in sources does not completely take away from her credibility.  Aside from her lack of sources I have no complaints for this editorial.  I agree with what she is trying to say about the candidates since I feel the same way.  I don't really support one candidate or the other since I don't agree completely with any of their platforms.  I like how she describes it as choosing the “lesser of the two evils” because that is exactly how I feel right now when it comes to choosing a candidate.  This will be my first year to vote and I want to make sure I choose exactly the right candidate who will support my political beliefs, but what do I do when none of the candidate do this?  And I love, and I mean love, what she says about where our candidates focus seems to be now days.  “But, apparently, the bigger concerns for our candidates are decisions that don’t involve them and what some people choose to do in their bedrooms,” to me this hits the nail on the head with the current political issues in circulation.  Who cares about who’s marrying who?  Why don’t we put all that effort towards something that will affect the entire population instead of just a small portion of it?  For example, the awesome economy we are living in right now is on the very top of my list of concerns and I’m only 17.

Health care

Healthcare is one of the biggest issues in our modern society.  It is vital in determining how easily we can access and afford what we need to maintain our health; whether that is medicine, procedures, or basic check ups.  So it comes as no surprise that it is one of the main deciding factors in what candidate we choose to support in our presidential elections.  When Obama was elected he enacted the Affordable Care Act.  The Act itself outlines a plan in which it will provide health insurance coverage to more than 94% of Americans but still staying under Obama’s 900 billion dollar budget, thus it hopes to reduce the nations budget deficit over the next ten years.  The Act itself has recently come under fire and is currently undergoing review in the Supreme Court due requirement of “minimal essential coverage,” also known as the individual mandate.  The mandate itself requires that every American have minimum health care insurance or be charged with a penalty in their tax return.  It is being declared unconstitutional under the first Article of the Constitution.  

         I find it interesting that Obama was elected partially based on his plan for healthcare and now two years after the act has already been implemented it has gone to the Supreme Court because it was declared “unconstitutional.”  Especially after the Act has already claimed to have given affordable health care to 2.5 million young people.  If this act was unconstitutional why hasn’t something been said before now?  More specifically why hasn’t something been said before the 8 or so months leading up the 2012 presidential elections?  I find it hard to believe that they are just now finding this act unconstitutional when the plan has been public since Obama had his first presidential elections in 2008.  The correlation between the two of these events could be completely independent and I may just be reading to far into the circumstances, but I found that connection to be interesting.  Furthermore, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.  The act has already given us evidence to it’s success with the example of the 2.5 million young people who now have affordable health insurance as well as lowering the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly.  The individual mandate simply requires that everyone be required to have the minimum health insurance, which I think is fair to the citizens that have been paying for other people’s healthcare through their taxes because they did not have insurance.  I do understand that some people truly can not afford health care and that’s where I think we need to step in and address those people, but the majority of our population can afford healthcare but merely have not stepped up and gotten insurance since they can get healthcare for free and paid for by tax dollars.  The Supreme Court justices are apparently looking for a way to compromise if the individual mandate is seen as unconstitutional, and want to find a way to keep the act intact if this event should occur.    Like I’ve said before this is merely a teenagers perspective, I may be completely wrong or misguided but this is what I have gotten from the information presented about this issue. 

Sources

President Confident Health Law Will Stand, New York Times

Responsible Reform For the Middle Class

 Legal Challenges to the Affordable Health Care Act