SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
How does the U.S. legal system handle a case where the alleged assailant in a violent crime is just 14 years old? That's at issue in this week's school shooting in Winder, Ga. NPR criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson joins us. Meg, thank you for being with us.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: The alleged shooter is 14, but he is being prosecuted in Georgia as an adult. How do officials make that determination?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So all 50 states allow children to be prosecuted as adults. Who decides, though, varies by state. Sometimes it's a prosecutor. Sometimes it's a judge. Sometimes it's based on state law. There's usually a minimum age. It's often 14 or 15 years old, but it also depends on the crime. So in Georgia, for instance, any child 13 or older charged with murder automatically ends up in adult court.
And experts that I spoke to say nearly all juveniles who commit school shootings across the country do end up being tried as adults. And that's because there's often intense pressure from the community, from parents, understandably, to hold these young people accountable for a lot of irreversible harm.
SIMON: Meg, what is the legal argument against trying juveniles as adults?
ANDERSON: So it's basically based in brain science. Our brains are not done developing until we're in our mid-20s. So children and teenagers, you know, they're more impulsive, less able to regulate their emotions, less able to think through the consequences of their actions. Marsha Levick, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, says that can be really hard, though, to talk about in cases as violent and horrendous as a school shooting.
MARSHA LEVICK: The fact that a child commits a murder does not erase the developmental immaturity that they possess. And so as hard as it is to say, and as hard as it is for individuals to hear, if you asked me the question directly - should this 14-year-old be tried as an adult? - I would say no.
ANDERSON: She says if the goal is for people who commit violent crimes to be rehabilitated, trying children as adults is just not that effective.
SIMON: Meg, please tell us also about the decision to charge Colin Gray, the father of the 14-year-old in Georgia.
ANDERSON: Yeah. Colin Gray is facing a number of charges, including four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder. This is still very uncommon, but we are seeing some parents being charged for crimes that their children commit. Earlier this year, Jennifer and James Crumbley, in Michigan, were convicted for their role in a school shooting that their son carried out in which four students were killed.
Jillian Peterson is a criminal justice professor at Hamline University. She studies school shootings and says it's possible that the threat of prosecution might encourage some parents to, for instance, safely store their guns.
JILLIAN PETERSON: The parents, especially if they're being approached by law enforcement or by school officials, if parents are thinking, I could be charged with murder if something happens, that could actually be a deterrent. Now, are the parents in these situations thinking that way? - maybe, maybe not.
ANDERSON: But she says, you know, there are all kinds of interventions that can potentially prevent a school shooting in the first place. A big one, which I kind of alluded to earlier, is making it harder for young people to get guns in the first place.
SIMON: Meg, what's ahead in this case that's receiving so much attention?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So preliminary hearings for both the teenager in this Georgia shooting and his father, they're scheduled, both, for December 4. And in Georgia, you know, debate among lawmakers continues around bills that would incentivize safer gun storage, but they haven't yet reached any kind of consensus.
SIMON: NPR's Meg Anderson. Thanks so much for being with us.
ANDERSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
