11 year old murders step mom. Ang mor superior genes in action!

[Rogue Trader]

US child appeals against being tried for murder as an adult

Jordan Brown, who was 11 when he allegedly killed his father's pregnant fiancee, could face life sentence with no parole

Lawyers for a child in Pennsylvania who was 11 when he allegedly shot and killed his father's pregnant fiancee attempted today to persuade an appeals court not to try him as an adult under America's harsh system of juvenile justice.

Unless the lawyers for Jordan Brown who is now aged 13, can convince the judges to change tack, he will be tried in adult court and if convicted will serve an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole. He would become the youngest child in US history to be sentenced to be incarcerated forever.

The US is the only country where juveniles are serving life imprisonment without parole under the so-called "life means life" policy. Only the US and Somalia have refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which rules out life sentences with no chance of release for crimes committed before the age of 18.

Brown is accused of having killed Kenzie Houk, in February 2009 at her home in the countryside about 35 miles north-west of Pittsburgh. According to the prosecution, Brown shot her through the back of the head as she slept in her bedroom.

He is then alleged to have got on the school bus and gone to his elementary school as usual.

Houk, 26, was just two weeks away from her due date and her unborn child, who would have been called Christopher, died too. Brown has been charged with two counts of homicide.

Brown allegedly carried out the killing using his own hunting rifle, a shotgun designed specifically for children. The prosecution alleges that the killing was premeditated and they found residue from the gun on Brown's shoulder.

When he was first presented to court Brown was made to wear shackles around his wrists and ankles.

Human rights campaigners are protesting the treatment of Brown as an adult. Amnesty International said the move would be a violation of international law. "It is shocking that anyone this young could face life imprisonment without parole, let alone in a country which labels itself as a progressive force for human rights," said Susan Lee, head of the campaign's Americas operation.

The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based campaign, said no other country had juveniles serving life without parole. "That leads to only two conclusions: either kids in the US are far more violent than those in the rest of the world, or the US has developed uniquely harsh sentences."

At a federal level, the US penal system has been inching towards a more lenient approach to juvenile crime. In 2005 the US supreme court abolished the death penalty for under-18s.

Then last May it ruled that juveniles could not be subjected to life without parole for any crime other than homicide.

But that still leaves about 2,400 prisoners facing permanent imprisonment for homicides committed when they were children.

Pennsylvania, where all juveniles are automatically treated as adults unless a judge decides otherwise, heads the league table of 44 states that hand out the sentence, with about 450 cases.

Houk's death has divided the two families involved in their response to Brown's judicial treatment. The boy's father, Chris Brown, protests his son's innocence and says he has no idea what could await him.

"Try to explain to a 12-year-old what the rest of your life means. It's incomprehensible for him," he told ABC News last year.

The victim's mother, Deborah Houk, has pushed for the toughest sentence for the boy. "I can't stand this 'Oh, he's 11,' 'Oh, his clothes don't fit him,'" she told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review soon after her daughter's death. "He knew what he was doing. He killed my baby."

 

[Devil Within]

The boy's parents ought to be punished for not bringing the boy up properly. Spare the rod, you create a monster.

 

[Rogue Trader]

Anyone old enough will remember the brutal murder of 2yo James Bulger by 2 Brit yobs, aged 10 and 11 when the crime was committed in 1993. The 2 boys viciously tortured the victim and even sexually abused him before bashing his head in and leaving the body on the railway tracks.

They were then sentenced to be locked up until 18. After years of psychiatric tests, they were given new identities and released (on probation) in 2000.

Last year, one of the child murderers was again convicted and imprisoned. This time he was found guilty of the possession and distribution of child porn.

Criminal genes cannot be reformed. Only the death sentence can save the West.

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Child porn charges send James Bulger's killer back to jail

Victim's mother angered as ministry admits Jack Straw knew of cocaine and fighting incidents

Jon Venables, one of the young killers of James Bulger, has been jailed for downloading and distributing child pornography, as it emerged he had been arrested twice for fighting and drug possession before he was recalled to prison earlier this year.

The Ministry of Justice admitted that Jack Straw, then justice secretary, knew Venables had been arrested on both occasions in 2008 for cocaine possession and affray, but agreed with probation and police officials that he should not be recalled to prison.

The revelation enraged Bulger's mother, Denise Fergus. "We are surprised and concerned that he was not recalled under the terms of his parole licence" when he was accused of offences in 2008, she said through her solicitor after Venables, now 27, was handed a two-year sentence.

She was at the Old Bailey to hear Venables plead guilty to three charges of downloading and distributing indecent images and videos showing children as young as two being raped by adults. Ninety-nine pieces of child pornography were found on his computer, though there was evidence he had deleted at least 1,200 more, the court heard.

He also admitted posing on the internet as a 35-year-old woman called Dawn Smith, pretending to have an eight-year-old daughter whom she was prepared to rent out to paedophiles for a fee.

Venables appeared in court via videolink from prison, but in a unique decision, the judge decided that only he could be trusted to see the accused's face.

Mr Justice Bean ruled that allowing anyone else in the room – including Bulger's mother – to see him would pose a "considerable risk to Mr Venables's life". Instead, Venables's disembodied voice rang through the courtroom as he said just four words – "guilty" three times, when the charges were read to him, and a "yes" to confirm his name.

The last time he was in court was 17 years ago, in 1993. He was charged, along with his primary school friend Robert Thompson with murdering Bulger, who was two, after abducting him in Bootle shopping centre.

The pair were remanded to secure children's homes in the north-west, and were released on licence in 2001 under new identities after being deemed suitably rehabilitated.

Last night, the Ministry of Justice defended the decision not to recall Venables after the incidents in 2008. A spokeswoman for the ministry said that following the affray, "an additional licence condition of a curfew was added as a precaution". She said that after being caught with cocaine, he was randomly tested for class A drugs. The tests produced negative results.

She added: "At one point there were some concerns about JV's level of drinking. This was addressed through focused sessions."

Children's rights campaigners suggested the authorities must shoulder some responsibility for Venables being back behind bars.

Carolyne Willow, national co-ordinator at the Children's Rights Alliance for England, said: "Clearly, today's sentencing also brings into doubt the effectiveness of any therapeutic interventions that were tried whilst Jon Venables was locked up as a young and growing child."

But the ministry was defiant, saying that while a thorough independent review was being carried out into the supervision of Venables from 2001 to 2010, only one person was to blame. "The direct responsibility for these offences must lie with Jon Venables," said a spokeswoman.

It was in February this year that Venables was arrested and recalled over child pornography allegations after images were found on his computer in bizarre circumstances. Venables had called his probation officer in a panic after believing someone had discovered his real identity and was told to start packing and be prepared to leave his Cheshire home.

Half an hour later, the probation officer found his 27-year-old charge sitting at a desktop computer frantically hacking away at the hard drive with a knife, and then a tin opener. "I'm trying to reformat the hard drive," Venables said, explaining that he wanted to delete personal details.

The following day, a police officer from the e-forensics crime unit took away the computer for analysis. If police and probation were already in a quandary over the potential identity breach of one of their most sensitive ex-prisoners, what was found on the hard drive took the situation to a new level.

Venables was not a star alumnus of England's juvenile rehabilitation system, having been arrested twice, but there had been nothing to prepare them for discovering the haul of child pornography he had amassed on his computer.

Today, when the scale of those offences were laid out in Court 14, it was worse than most people dared imagine. Most troubling of all was the third charge on the indictment, which related to three conversations Venables had with a paedophile over the internet in February 2008.

It was during these chats that Venables invented another identity for himself: that of 35-year-old Dawn "Dawnie" Smith, a married woman from Liverpool who boasted about abusing her eight-year-old daughter, together with her husband. Posing as Dawn, Venables struck up a conversation with Leslie Blanchard, a 52-year-old kitchen fitter from Chelmsford, Essex, who had a large stash of child pornography and was keen to star in some of his own.

During one discussion on 27 February 2008, Dawn/Venables suggested that for the right price, Blanchard could travel to Liverpool and abuse her daughter. Blanchard, who last October was convicted of possessing child pornography and trying to meet a girl to abuse her, was keen, and handed over his phone number to take negotiations further.

Just how did Jon Venables end up behaving in such a manner? Had not Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice, said 10 years ago that Venables had "made exceptional progress as a child adolescent serving HMP [detention during her majesty's pleasure] with personal development, acknowledgement of the enormity of his offence, understanding of his actions as a child, and in his 'normal' adolescent development in 'abnormal circumstances'"?

In court yesterday, his counsel, Edward Fitzerald, QC, said Venables's highly unusual past had played a part in the nature of his reoffending.

Venables was forced into a "wholly abnormal situation" of living under an assumed name amid "constant fear of reprisals," said Fitzgerald. His isolation had led him into a "downward spiral of drink and drugs" and he had become addicted to cocaine and mephedrone, said the barrister.

The 27-year-old had managed to work continuously since his release, being paid at around the minimum wage, and working unsocial hours throughout. But he had always been unable to form a close relationship with a woman, as he would have to disclose his true identity as a condition of his licence, said Fitzgerald.

All the experts who encountered Venables agreed he was also deeply damaged by his experience in court back in November 1993. Both he and Thompson were just over the age of criminal responsibility, and so could be tried for murder.

The authorities took the decision to try the boys in an adult court, calling in the carpenters to Preston crown court to raise the dock so the boys (both under five foot, as their police mug shots, snapped by a height chart, so memorably proved) could see the courtroom. And the judge released their identities, allowing the public to know that Child A was Thompson and Child B Venables.

The decision to do so "continues to shame us as a country internationally," said Willow. "Internationally there is real incredulity as to how could the UK, with its advanced legislation dealing with children and families, its advance welfare services, its aggressive rhetoric on children, how could you have responded in this way? It comes up all the time."

She added: "[The] sentencing also brings into doubt the effectiveness of any therapeutic interventions that were tried whilst Jon Venables was locked up as a young and growing child."

Even the man responsible for designing Venables's reform programme admits now that he always thought the odds were stacked against successful rehabilitation.

In 1993, when the boys were arrested, Malcolm Stevens was the home secretary's special adviser on the care and detention of all young people convicted of grave crimes and detained at her majesty's pleasure – the equivalent of a life sentence for juveniles.

When they were found guilty, it was his job to strike the delicate balance between punishment and rehabilitation. "I had to put a programme together which had all the elements of education and healthcare and leisure that would normalise – as far as you possibly could – their way of life when they were locked inside a secure institution," Stevens said this week.

Though Stevens maintains that Venables did "very well" in the Red Bank secure unit, at Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, he says he never believed the boys could be truly rehabilitated. "I wasn't confident at all. There was no precedent to take children that young, in those sorts of circumstances."

The only reference point, he said, was that of Mary Bell, who in 1968 killed two young boys – one the day before her 11th birthday; one two months later. "But whatever was put in place for her was irrelevant by 1993," said Stevens. "I was not optimistic, simply because we know that people who have been brought up in institutions for years and years have a devil's own job to adjust, to resettle … That is very, very difficult. Irrespective of who they were, if you had spent your entire adolescence in an institution, you haven't got the best chance of being able to live on your own in whatever circumstances in the big wide world,."

A statement from his solicitor suggested Venables never realised just how hard it would be.

"It is no excuse at all, but Jon Venables does say now, on reflection, that, not knowing quite what the world he was released into was like, or how it worked, he perhaps didn't fully appreciate the extent to which the passage of time by itself would not blunt his frustrations and unhappiness," said the statement.

"He says that he appreciates there was no blueprint available to him, or those offering him support – he felt like a canary down a mine. The return to prison was something of a relief when it came. He intends to learn lessons to help him face this challenge again."

 

[cass888]

Human rights campaigners are protesting the treatment of Brown as an adult. Amnesty International said the move would be a violation of international law. "It is shocking that anyone this young could face life imprisonment without parole, let alone in a country which labels itself as a progressive force for human rights," said Susan Lee, head of the campaign's Americas operation.

These are the type of people the MONGREL who bit his masters' hands LOUDHAILER chee soon juan hang out with. The barbarian is the murder, not the authorities.