Law: Age of Accountability

When do juveniles become adults?

Authorities in Milpitas, Calif., had never seen such a case of bleak amorality and callousness. Last month, they report, Anthony Jacques Broussard bragged to friends about strangling his former girlfriend, and then invited them out to see the body. One onlooker tossed a stone at the corpse; another helped to hide it; for two days no one notified the authorities. These were not hardened ex-convicts or members of a motorcycle gang. They were teen-age students at Milpitas High School. Anthony Broussard was 16, and the dead girl, Marcy Renee Conrad, was just 14. Even while they try to understand the nature of such a horror, California juvenile officials are now considering a confounding legal question: Should the alleged killer be tried as a juvenile or as an adult?

It is a question that is increasingly posed by a society that has become terrified of its young. When is a juvenile no longer a juvenile? To a growing number of lawyers, politicians and citizens, the answer is that youthful offenders who commit “grownup” crimes should no longer be treated as children. Says Harvard Law Professor Arthur Miller: “The pendulum is swinging in favor of making juveniles accountable as adults, for adult crimes, at an earlier age.” Sometimes a single crime is enough to change the rules. In Vermont last spring, two boys, ages 15 and 16, allegedly raped, stabbed and beat two twelve-year-old girls, killing one; an outraged legislature swiftly lowered the “magic line” at which a person charged with a serious offense may be tried and sentenced as an adult. Vermont’s new age limit: ten.

Nine states have no limit at all. “Theoretically, it is possible to condemn a seven-year-old kid to death in six of these states,” says Hunter Hurst, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice. In most states, though, a serious juvenile offender between the ages of 14 and 16 is eligible to be tried as an adult. The actual treatment of each child is usually left to the discretion of the juvenile judge. Among the criteria that judges use in making their decisions: the seriousness of the charge, the history of the child and the availability of effective facilities for the rehabilitation of the minor.

But most such detention centers are nearly as noxious as adult prisons. “They are nothing more than crime factories and sodomy schools,” says Andrew Vachss, director of the Juvenile Justice Planning Project. Yet the court system itself still reflects a traditional, perhaps outdated, belief in the fundamental innocence of children. The handling of juveniles, says Professor Miller, “is based on broad assumptions about 14-and 15-year-old naivete which in turn is based on 19th century conceptions about youth.”

Whatever the failings of today’s youth courts and lockups, the problem that most stirs public anger is the length of time violent young criminals serve. Last July in Texas, David Keeler shot to death his mother and father, who was president of ARCO Oil & Gas Co.; David will no longer be under the control of juvenile officials when he reaches 18. Authorities typically lose jurisdiction when juveniles are no longer minors, and the offenders often go free.

Punishment can be far more severe in an adult court. Last March in California, two boys of 17 who raped and attempted to murder a young woman were each sentenced to 72 years to life in prison by an adult court. Neither will be eligible for parole until he is 65.

Until now the U.S. Supreme Court has not set maximum limits on the punishment of youthful criminals. But the court is currently considering a juvenile death penalty case.

In 1977 Monty Lee Eddings, then 16, murdered an Oklahoma highway patrolman with a sawed-off shotgun; he was condemned to death by an adult court. His lawyers have asked the Justices to rule that death is a disproportionate penalty for so young an offender. However the court rules, though, the public mood apparently holds that anyone old enough to commit the crime is old enough to pay the price.