Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
This is genuinely disappointing. I understand the need for punishment, but unless there is therapy, a path to recovery and reintegration into society, we’re just housing more and more people without a future.
I’m sorry, but at 15 you’re old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
Sure but what’s even the point of a youth Justice system if you’re gonna say that and try every kid as an adult?
A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of “boundary exploring” behaviors.
A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with “kids” so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.
The tolerance we have for “youthful indiscretion” does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.
I’m sorry, but at 15 you’re old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
Yes? What do you think they’re implying, that we should try to rehabilitate criminals… but only if they’re still young?
I think (and forgive me if I’m wrong) they’re essentially saying that without a rehabilitory justice system, we’re just locking people up for life and creating a net drain on society. Financially, culturally… it’s a morale drain on our nation, even.
Not to mention that as a society we’re abandoning a person who, through a justice system built on rehabilitation and not some ye oldie Catholic concept of creating a punishing Hell on Earth, could actually flourish one day, adding to our society instead of taking from it.
A prison system designed to simply incarcerate, punish and torture those it touches will never offer anywhere near the same benefits to us as one that is designed to attempt to rehabilitate.
Not everybody can be rehabilitated, of course, but that’s like saying we shouldn’t try to treat cancer, because not everybody can be cured.
So a basic concept of right and wrong is enough to try someone as an adult?
And since a 8 year old knows a stove might be hot he should be allowed to drive, drink and smoke ,right? 🥸
Yep. The kind of humanoid that would choose to do this has some sort of fundamental fault. Unit is defective, recall to warehouse, keep in observation to further refine diagnostic models. Or just return to manufacturer.
Yeah this kind of rhetoric doesn’t sound at all like a deranged psychopath who believes in exterminating the “other”…
Oh so we shouldn’t help people unless they were perfect?
What an insanely simplistic take on the matter. I don’t believe you’re seriously suggesting that the murderer didn’t actually understand that stabbing people to death is wrong.
If you stabbed someone to death after a brief conversation, there’s something wrong with you, and it likely puts you high on the ASP disorder spectrum, which doesn’t really have a cure. Its akin to being a psychopath (which really isn’t a diagnostic word anymore, but i think it gets the point across better). Point is, you don’t get better from being a psychopath.
That’s all a sign of just how sick our society is. We can treat mental health, we can offer higher quality education, by doing so, we give a person the opportunity to elevate their socioeconomic status. These are largely key factors in criminal behavior. But instead we just lock up the criminal, because it’s cheaper. We can’t fix our society until the government stops prioritizing profit over health and education.
I actually read the article, and if you get all the way to the first sentence, you’ll learn that he will be eligible for release starting at 28.
A 15-year-old boy who followed a teenager he did not know through Birmingham city centre and stabbed him to death after a four-minute conversation has been jailed for life with a minimum of 13 years.
What about the other teenager? The one who died?
He never gets to go home, he’ll never be part of society again.
While that’s obviously very sad and tragic the purpose of criminal justice should never be vengeance or an eye for an eye. It should be about rehabilitation and reintegration. Yes it’s awful that a life was lost but functionally removing another life from society for forever is hardly a good solution.
Takes care of recidivism, though. But I wouldn’t advocate it for that reason.
Someone who will commit murder at the age of 15 is very badly damaged, and will need a great deal of help to not be a danger to others in the future. That’s the compassionate route.
Almost zero governments will want to spend the money. Sadly, it’s cheaper to keep them locked up.
Oh no, someone died… I guess the only solution is to provide free housing and food to the criminal, while not providing anything else he needs ensuring he’ll stay a piece of shit that does nothing but steal from society and will likely end up killing more. /s
Even a death sentence would be better at this point! Playing the emotion card falls flat if your solution is even worse.
Is there any data showing that this is more effective for reducing future violent crime?
How does your question take into account the victim’s family at all? You may not like it but one of the pillars of justice is seeking a fair and just punishment for the victim and their loved ones. You may not care about the murder victim’s family so somebody has to.
You can’t act like a crime is all about the perpetrator and their needs.
It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.
In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.
When I was 15, I knew it was wrong to stab people. It’s not like getting into a fight on the playground. When you bring out a knife, or any deadly weapon, you immediately escalate things way beyond what school administration can handle.
As a kid, I knew there were crimes I could do that were just “boys being boys.” Smoking weed, petty theft, vandalism, even getting into fist-fights. I also knew there were crimes that were off limits, such as rape and murder. Just about everyone around me knew the same thing, too.
You’re advocating for a culture that encourages kids to commit more crimes and more serious crimes than they otherwise would because they know they will get off easy.
It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.
The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.
The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.
Regardless of the veracity of your argument, it is not helpful to denigrate someone you are conversing with. Please just work with the information you have in the context of the discussion. There’s no need to make such insinuations to establish your point.
Your prescription seems to assume that either:
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Everyone can be rehabilitated, which no society has ever achieved.
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That it’s preferable to push a well understood risk to people’s lives back into the community than it is to keep that risk in the care of the state where they can’t kill more people.
…but you strike me as too sensible to prescribe that kind of thing, so what have I missed?
Lots of/most/almost all prisoners are rehabilitated though?
We only hear about the very small minority that make attention grabbing headlines.
I’m in Europe BTW.
Not really. Look up the life of car thiefs. Most gain inside knowledge after leaving prison with fresh connections.
Prisons are almost like a networking opportunity. Mark Cann made an interesting video about it.
“Western” countries don’t have a way to deal with the handful of truly irredeemable criminals. They will not and cannot be members of society ever.
But what do we do with them? Lock them up forever? Kill them? Nobody knows.
I think it’s pretty straightforwardly reasonable to say that we should above all else, remove their ability to continue to do harm. There’s going to be a range of views on exactly what that should look like - mostly based on your view of how punitive we should be. Options would include confinement, exile, medication, lobotomy, and execution.
Personally, I think ending someone through death, lobotomy, and the like is unnecessarily barbaric. Confinement in one form or another seems like the most reasonable option, and I think consentual alternatives are debatable.
Locking them up helps all the other people they won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill
Locking you (and everyone making similar comments here) up would also help all the people that you won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill. Because how can I know that you won’t ever commit a crime like that?
The idea that you can get security by simply locking everyone up who commits a crime is delusional and for the outcomes you only need to check the US.
Good.
We should not let acts of violence like go unpunished.
We need to set an example for anyone else who may be thinking about committing the same thing.
Isn’t boy 15 just another way to say teenager?
The kid fucked up.
They should be rehabilitated slowly and serve their time and then be reintegrated into society when they show they are ready to be and have served sufficient time.
They shouldn’t be thrown away for 70 years.
The kid fucked up.
He stabbed someone to death, he didn’t accidentally total his step dad’s Corvette.
The man he killed is never going to go home again, and he’s not going to do anything for the next 70 years. His family will spend every holiday without him, every milestone in their lives passed without him.
Because “the kid fucked up.” 🙄
Yes, the crime was horrendous. But if society just gives up on the idea of rehabilitating criminals that’s not going to bring anyone back. It’s just going to hurt more people unnecessarily, innocent and otherwise.
Obviously the murderer should not be released until they are adequately rehabilitated (if they ever are). But in a just society prisons are for rehabilitation.
Yeah. They did something terrible. I think we’re both on the same page here.
I think their point is that “fucking up” makes it sound like he did a little oopsie, a boys will be boys, youthful idiocy thing. Which it isn’t at all
We’re not, the victim lost everything: their future, their life, moments with family, etc. And you’re making it sound like, “Well, yeah, but he just made a mistake.”
You don’t stab someone to death by mistake, it isn’t a “fuck up.” Killing someone via stabbing is an aggressive, personal, close quarters kind of death. You can’t stab someone to death “accidentally,” and during the act, did he ever stop? While the victim was likely shouting in pain or pleading or trying to get away, did the kid stop his “fuck up”?
No. He knew exactly what he was doing, and there’s no rehabilitating that, especially if it occurred after a brief conversation in public. He forfeited his right to his life as soon as he took his victim’s, when he chose to willfully stab a man to death.
Edit: Literally the first sentence details how the two boys had the four-minute conversation with the victim, followed the victim around Birmingham’s city centre, and then stabbed him to death despite the victim being a complete stranger.
And neither boy showed any remorse or emotion during their sentencing. The one who actually stabbed the victim tries to claim he feared for his safety, and was “just trying to scare the boy.” Guess that’s why he needed to plunge a large knife into the kid’s chest when, as the judge pointed out, all they did was try to get Mr. “Just Fucked Up” to leave them alone.
So… I thought even England only had a life sentence for adults, and they had the option for parole every 10 years?
Edit: average life term is 15-20 years before parole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_and_Wales#%3A~%3Atext%3DIn_England_and_Wales%2C_the%2Cminimum_term_of_40_years.
Life imprisonment is applicable only to defendants aged 18 and over. Those aged under 18 are sentenced to an indeterminate sentence (detention at His Majesty’s pleasure). Any convict sentenced to a life sentence can in principle be held in custody for their whole life, assuming parole is never given for juveniles.
Read the article, lots of nuances, he’s probably got 10 years before his parole hearing, but this stuff goes in and out of courts a lot because the government often tries to interfere.
Sadly, this seems like it’s likely a case of psychopathy. Technically you can’t diagnose minors with it, but they have pre-adult terms for the same thing.
Children at that age, at least according to the majority of modern research, have extremely low rates of successful behavioral reconditioning towards socially acceptable norms. It’s almost zero.
The best researchers have been able to do, even with extremely intensive treatment, is to slightly curb their most violent and predatory tendencies.
I agree that we should take a non-retributive approach to justice, but the sad truth in these cases, at least as far as we know right now, these folks cannot be fixed and reintroduced into the general population, they are too dangerous.
Their brains, either through genetic misfortune, or through extreme sustained trauma from infancy, are permanently malformed. They lack any significant capacity for empathy or love. They cannot relate to other people on any level, especially emotionally. Their brains are literally not wired for it, as awful as that is.
We shouldn’t throw them in a hole though. They should be permanently imprisoned in specialty facilities that constantly treat their mental disorder and try to employ them in productive jobs that can help society. They should be provided proper medical care and resources, possibly tightly supervised short term release in condition of exceptional behavior and treatment response.
