I’m not interested in seeing a repeat show of this kid’s psychossiss hence best set a strong precident now as things are far from over in general concerning hate crimes.

Bullying is too much already, but point blank murder? Guilty as charged.

I don’t buy that at all. When I was 14 I often fantasized about killing the people that bullied me but I was well aware of what such actions would mean.

Stephen said “Life in prison? Dear God. Some very harsh people around.”.

In Canada life in prison is 25 years – that would be an apropriate sentence in this case.

Stephen said “Children should not be exposed to adult prisoners or adult prisons.”.

And he won’t be until he’s an adult, he’ll spend any time under 18 in a juvenile facility

Life in prison? Dear God. Some very harsh people around. I hope I never have to rely on your mercy. And I hope you’re never in some unaccountable position where you need the mercy of others.

Children should not be exposed to adult prisoners or adult prisons. This kid should be helped not further harmed. What he did was bad enough. We shouldn’t be in the revenge business.

Or how about this, Brandon is a closeted homophobe who should be given life in prison for murder.

People, let me make something very clear. Sociopaths are evident in early age. We know that a gay kid doesn’t have to provoke or do anything to enrage someone or be the target of assault.

McInerney knew early who to target, who to pick on and decided how he’d handle it in such a way that he knew going to jail would be the option.
He. Just. Didn’t. Care.

It’s true that teens have less impulse control than someone a bit older, but the difference isn’t that great.
McInerny DID try to run away and conceal the weapon after the crime.
Be careful here. Because gangs use juvenile soldiers specifically assuming that age is a defense unto itself. Creating a system of parole in which regardless of the cruelty, and calculus of a crime committed by someone under age, they can be paroled by the age of 21 or 25.
A situation in which THEY KNOW that their crime DOESN’T carry the consequences IT DESERVES and so therefore the impact of such a crime is lost on them.

The death penalty, or ANY penalty is so abstract to young people, that they have NO SENSE of the consequences of such crimes. Not really.
And THAT is the real problem.
The Scared Straight program is one way of addressing this abstraction. And putting ALL juveniles in the same category based on age, won’t do. There are some vicious and hard 14 year olds out there.
Whether you want to think so or not. McInerney’s LOSER parents are culpable. But his loser father is dead anyway.

Being soft on juveniles won’t help. It’s being harder on neglectful parents, committing to the death penalty and other penalties that will work better and showing young people at risk where they will end up and how they will be treated if they don’t abide by the law.

Take this paragraph from the article:

Fellow students say the two had clashed for days over King’s expressing his attraction to McInerney. King, who was living in a children’s shelter because of problems at home, had recently gone to school wearing eye makeup and women’s accessories.

The first sentence is a false presentation of the issue. “Fellow students” may have said just about anything, but based on the fuller coverage we know that King had been picked on by McInerny for a long time, long before the “flirting” began, and this was his way of fighting back. But Saillant presents this as though it was out of the blue. She sets up King as the unprovoked aggressor.

In the next sentence Saillant introduces an irrelevant comment to tie two separate ideas together. She’s reporting (not repeating what “fellow students” say) that King went to school in makeup. And – without any reason to mention it – she also says he was “living in a children’s shelter because of problems at home.”

Tying the two unrelated comments into a single sentence, Saillant has achieved the presentation of King who was so out of control with his crazy drag that he couldn’t even get along with his parents.

But she’s not through yet:

…provoked by King’s repeated sexual advances.

Screech… slam on the brakes.

Ask yourself – outside of this case, just in conversation – when you hear the term “repeated sexual advances”, what do you think of? Is is, oh say, “Will you be my valentine?”

Or is it perhaps an advance that is sexual in nature and repeated?

If Salliant is going to repeat the claims of the defense, she has a duty to note that the “repeated sexual advances” consisted of flirting, at most and did not consist of adult sexual advances. On the other hand, the “murder” consisted of murder.

And look at how McInerney is discussed:

The defense could face a challenge in portraying McInerney as a naive youth. At the time of the shooting, he looked young and sweet-faced. In court recently, the defendant was a tall, lanky young man dressed in crisp Oxford shirts and khaki pants.

Salliant doesn’t talk about the difficulty of his defense having to deal with Nazi materials, racist symbols, or McInerney’s long history of terrorizing King. No, no, it’s his age that is a problem.

I suspect that Salliant is among those who think 14 is too young to be tried for murder. She wants to look at “all the circumstances” and see McInerney as “a victim too”. She wants to “present both sides”.

And the easiest way to do that – as he is a pretty nasty neo-Nazi who ran in a pack of bullies – is to paint King as some sort of monster, a horrifying gay drag queen monster – worse even than McInerney.

Generally character assassination of the victim is left to the defense team. But it seems to me that much of the press, including Saillant, has joined the cause.

There is a legitimate case to be made that McInerney was too young and immature to be fully cognizant of the consequences of his actions. But it is unethical and immoral to take the shortcut of bashing King to exonerate McInerney.