Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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.

1 comment:

  1. It is an unfortunate case that should bring about new awareness to schools policies on supervision or even security. Obviously girls and boys around this age are just as capable of murder or firing a gun as an adult even though justice cannot be done because they are still only children in the grand scheme of things. Of course the mother would be upset losing a daughter but unfortunately at such a young age a typical punishment for other similar cases is time in a juvenile detention center. It is not fair but that is the law and the system we use I our country. Again, the important thing to get out of this horrible case is that something needs to be done to prevent it from happening in the future. We all need to learn from mistakes and flaws in our systems so that something like this can be avoided in the future. I agree that children should be escorted in and out of schools but that is not practiced nor are there any laws that enforce anything like this. When I was eleven I walked to school so I can understand how the opportunity for this fight to came about. But, that still doesn’t make it right. Our public education system compared to other countries is considered a fairly good program but that is in a separate category as far as ranking. We have a shockingly high percentage of incidences such as Joanna’s case as well as other cases related to drugs or weapons among our children in our school systems. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say the school is to blame because not everything can be prevented unless we put into action laws that require teachers to watch children entering and exiting before and after school. I would definitely agree that the school would be to blame if these laws were enforced at the time of the incident. The student should most definitely be charged in one form or another. If children aren’t punished for something this serious they will never learn. She should be punished in the most severe manner without a doubt because taking a life is horrific crime. I also agree that some systems in our government need to be revised and altered. If it were my child I would want justice but at the same time I’ve lost friends and family to violence and know that no matter what the consequences are for the defendant no punishment will right the wrong done.

    Jason Harris

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