Juvenile Offenders Tried in an Adult World

In America we take our amendments in our Constitution very seriously, especially the first ten. The first ten amendments provide us with essential rights and freedoms as well as protects us from being taken advantage of by the justice system of government. If you are being taken to trail for a crime, you have the right to a trail by jury. The jury consists of twelve members with diverse religions, ethnicity's, and gender. The jury are a selection of the defendants peers. Peers. In order to serve jury duty, you must be at least eighteen years old, you must legally be an adult. This means that juveniles who are tried as adults, yet are not adults have a jury of adults, not their peers. I came across an interesting article titled "A Jury of Their Peers". In this article it talks about a method of punishment called peer court. Peer court is a new branch of court. It is a court made for juveniles who commit small offences. In peer court the members of the jury, judge, and lawyers are all peers. They are all under the age of nineteen. According the article "sentences are generally creative forms of community service, never jail time, and the records show that 99% of those sentenced complete their tasks. Doing so keeps their criminal records clean, which helps their college and job applications". I believe the most important part of this system is that it is a jury of their peers.
Although this system would not be reasonable for any serious juvenile offenders, how about Anthony Laster. In my previous blog I told the story about Anthony Laster and his school yard dispute made him face fourteen days in jail and the possibility of up to seven years in an adult prison. Peer court seems like it would have been the better option for Anthony. In peer court his own peers would have been able to think in the same way that Anthony might have at the time of the "crime". I believe providing real peers for juvenile offenders would make the justice system more fair to juveniles. A thirty-four year old man cannot think the same way that a young offender would, but a seventeen year old teenager would have a more realistic insight. Now, this does not mean that a sixteen year old who commits car jacking with a deadly weapon should go home and with some fines and community service, but is it fair to take away a person's life and replace it with the misery of jail for one mistake?


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