The teenager arrested in the Georgia school shooting is not an adult and should not be treated like one

Our society has failed to cope with mass shootings, as was evident in the angry and panicked response of the justice system to Wednesday’s deadly attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, outside Atlanta.

Colt Gray, 14, is accused of using an AR-15 rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound nine others. Prosecutors charged him as an adult. They also charged his father, Colin Gray, with second-degree murder, manslaughter and child abuse, presumably for failing to keep the gun out of his son’s hands.

At a hearing Friday, Judge Currie Mingledorff told Colt Gray that he could face execution if convicted. The judge later had to call the teenager back into his courtroom so he could correct his statement: The maximum sentence for juveniles is life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to a landmark 2005 Supreme Court ruling.

In this opinion, the court recognized the development of brain research, which shows that young people lack maturity and should not be punished with death for a crime committed before reaching adulthood, no matter how cruel the crime.

We didn’t need brain science or this belated court ruling to realize that juveniles are not adults. This difference explains why there is a separate juvenile justice system, which most states have had for over a century. Minors have less moral and emotional capacity and should logically be subject to a different level of criminal culpability and punishment. It would be downright medieval to treat a criminally charged child the same as an adult.

This means more than simply not executing children or adults who committed their crimes as children. It means not putting them through the adult system, not housing them with adult offenders, or locking them up for their entire adult lives for crimes they committed before they had developed adult reasoning and conscience.

Yet the Supreme Court has refused to go much further than stopping the execution of juvenile offenders. States are free to continue to treat them as adults, and most do, as the recent shooting underscores. Georgia has a juvenile justice system that recognizes the lesser capacity of minors but ignores it in murder cases. The reasoning, if that’s the right word, seems to be that the more horrific a crime committed by a juvenile – the more senseless, cruel, disturbed – the more the perpetrator acted with the moral and emotional judgment of an adult. That’s backwards.

In fact, we still have a hard time accepting teenage killers as anything other than unfathomable monsters. A generation ago, the United States clung to the false notion that some adolescents were subhuman “super predators” who could be treated like wild animals and locked up or killed. Numerous studies have since disproved this theory, but fear, anger, and the horror of mass murder lead us to throw modern thinking and practices out the window and respond to an adolescent’s cruelty with more cruelty.

Anything to deflect blame from the instruments of mass murder. The gun lobby has had tremendous success in beating back laws regulating firearms and portraying them as a protection from violence and a symbol of freedom, rather than a source of violence and destroyer of life. Georgia, for example, is a state that allows open carry of weapons, and when Governor Brian Kemp recently signed a law expanding gun rights, he bragged – without irony – about arming his three children.

— Los Angeles Times