16-year-old sent to Utah prison for 15 years after judge changes terms of plea deal

[haele]

61. Probably taken advantage of by the older boys who knew his daddy had guns.

Happens alot - especially in the 16 - 20 year old ages when younger boys are trying to find acceptance amongst their peers.
For example, a couple years ago, this 19 year old freshman at a local junior college has a license and a nice little car. His new 21 year old friend (they have a couple classes together) has this slightly older "cool" cousin who knows a few DJs and they need a car to go club-hopping on Friday nights.

Disclaimer: Names, status, and exact social background of participants have been slightly changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent. This is a slightly fictionalized account, but the ages and the events were real...it was in the papers over the last decade, though it was only a lead story when shots were fired; the trial was page 8 or 10 of the currents section when it occurred.

Back to the example. Oh boy, this 19 year old is hanging out with older guys...doing real man stuff, not that high-school stuff.

Until the second or third night out, the cousin gets in a fight. They get thrown out of the club, and pile into the 19 year olds car to leave. And as they are leaving, the cousin riding in the backseat sees the guy he got into the fight with, lowers the window, leans out and levels his concealed semi-auto 22 cal handgun which the kid never knew he had and didn't know was there - all he (and the friend riding in the passenger seat) saw was the cousin leaning out the window and waiving his arm. The cousin then yells at the guy and later admits to attempting to empty the magazine over the crowd "to make his point" - which scares the driver who then guns the car to get away.

This throws the shooter off balance while in the process of shooting, causing shots to go wild and he wings a couple innocent bystanders, killing one of them. Not knowing what happened, they get onto the freeway and head a couple miles away, pull over at someone else's house (one of the cousin's friends) and clean the shells out the car. The 19 and 21 year old try to pretend it never happened while the cousin flees town.

A month later, the 19-year old is arrested for being "the driver in a gang-related drive-by". Now, mind you, the cousin had been already been identified, caught, and charged with Murder 2, the 21 year old who had been riding in the passenger seat was arrested a couple hours before the 19 year old, and charged with accessory after the fact after a plea deal and bailed out to stand trial later. The 19 year old was then arrested and tried to plea bargain for the same charge as his friend, but he was charged with Murder 2 - same as the cousin who shot the gun that killed the innocent bystander, and he was not allowed any bail; he ended up spending 30 months in the county lock-up awaiting to stand trial with the cousin.

See, at the time of the arrest, the DA was up for re-election and needed to be tough on those nasty gangs, even though at the hearing it was proven that the kid never had any acquaintance prior to with the cousin and didn't know him outside the few times they went to the clubs. Nor was the other student, who plea bargained a member of a gang - both were "straight A" students. But the 19 year old was driving the car and he was from a "mixed" family, even though he was raised like any other middle class kid. After all, it is common knowledge that young men who are not wealthy enough to go to a proper university are all potential gang members, no matter what they are doing to further their lives, what color they are or background they come from.


According to the family member who served on the driver's jury, the driver eventually was acquitted because of the overwhelming push by the prosecution to find the kid an evil gang member to be thrown away for life instead of being the proven stupid young man who was taken advantage of by someone he didn't really know, but there were still a couple jury members who had a hard time understanding that an arrest does not mean automatic guilt to all charges.
The family member did say that if the kid was charged with what he had actually done according to evidence, witnesses and testimony, they would have probably found him guilty of felony accessory after the fact, which would have probably left him with time served, and he could go on with whatever life would be left to him.

Sure, the 19 year old was stupid - stupid for wanting to hang out in clubs with "cool" friends when he was under-aged, and certainly criminally stupid for cleaning out the car, but Murder 2 with minimum 15 years to max life in prison?

In the OP's case, if the 16 year old was not the ringleader (which I would highly doubt, being as the other kids were older), and this was a case of they knew his dad had guns, chances are he was just being a typical stupid, aimless young man trying to feel important at a time of life where everything is already going wrong with him emotionally.
If he admitted to a plea deal just as his co-defendants did, he should have gotten the same deal. But nooo... tough on crime and all that BS. It's not about rehabilitation, it's Old Testament Retribution, by golly.

16 year olds - male and female - are generally driven to doing criminally stupid acts more by inexperienced braggadocio and fear of inadequacy than actual evil intent. The emotional pull into herd mentality is almost overwhelming. Their brains are still short-circuiting, and their peers will to dictate their actions far more than their actual upbringing or any logical thought process they may still possess does.
And from what I've observed with my own stepdaughter and her peers, this sort of stupid criminality happens a lot in the flail through adolescence. Most of the time, they don't get caught and it can be covered up or "forgotten". Lord knows she did enough wrong that were we more "tough" and "letter of the law", she would have been in juvie - or worse - off and on between the ages of 15 and 18.

I'm not saying that the 16 year old should get off scott free, I'm pointing out that the punishment this kid got far outweighed what he was capable of doing.

Haele