Thursday, February 28, 2008

What's truely senseless?! Sending Youths to Adult Prisons!

James Edward "Lil' J" Smoot was 14 years old when his fellow Bloods gang members pressed a loaded 9 mm gun into his hand and directed him to knock on the door of an Essex man who failed to pay a weekly $250 "protection fee" to sell marijuana on the gang's turf.

When the man, Marquel "Marty" Smith, opened his door, Smoot pulled the trigger, shooting the man in the head and chest.

"He killed him because somebody told him to," prosecutor J.R. Francomano told a judge yesterday at the young gunman's sentencing hearing. "This was nothing less than a gang hit."

Saying he was disturbed by gangs' ability to "suck in young men like this" to commit the worst of their crimes, Baltimore County Circuit Judge Timothy J. Martin sentenced Smoot to 20 years in prison.

While the murder was truly senseless, what is really senseless is that Smoot was been convicted as a adult.
Smoot, now 15, pleaded guilty in November to second-degree murder and a handgun charge. He was prosecuted in adult court.

Juvenile courts were established for a reason, to rehabilitate youths and keep them separate from adult prisoners. Due to the "tough on crime" political polices established by the political whores in Annapolis and in Congress more children, as young as 14 are being sent to adult prisons. As I mentioned, prison facilitates are currently run as human warehouses. They do not rehabilitate inmates because the way they are run.

The facts about children in adult jail speak for themselves.

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