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?
Youth justice is for the many nuanced & lower stakes scenarios. Stealing a car, breaking windows, shoplifting/petty theft, getting into fights, drug abuse/addiction, arson, criminal mischief, etc.
Not stabbing strangers to death.
You can’t equate the two.
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.
You got the purpose of juvenile justice completely wrong: It is focussed more on rehabilitation and less on deterrence than the adult one because juveniles are still way more formable. Psychologists will descend upon him, and they’ll do the job his parents and neighbours didn’t (or couldn’t) do, a job which, at 15, noone is able to do on their own.
That’s vile. Of course they’ll be unredeemable if you don’t give them the chance to redeem themselves.
My decision to give or withhold a second chance for this kid is irrelevant.
He can try as hard as he wants to dig redemption out of his victim’s grave, but it’s simply not possible. Unless you’re alleging this kid is some kind of necromancer, he is fundamentally incapable of redemption.
Save the pshrinks for kids who can be saved.
Even if you now demand a life for a life, which isn’t your call to make, it very much is possible: He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
You’re plain and simply out for blood. An eye has been struck out, and you hide your desire to see the whole world blind behind “well, we don’t have to poke it out, we only have to sew it shut” (put him in prison vs. executing).
Sure. He might save more lives than anyone who has ever existed. The chances of that happening are as good as winning the lottery, but hey, it could happen.
He might also take another life. Or twenty. Or a million. The chances of that are substantially higher: far more people lose the lottery than win anything at all.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. The best approach to playing the lottery is to lock up the money you would have used, and never let it out to buy a ticket.
I find interesting that there’s a lot of “might”, “maybe” and “possible” when talking about rehabilitation, but not as much attention is paid to the “absolute” of another person’s death. Possibilities and potentials won’t bring that victim back to life.
If only he was now in a situation where he can be dealt with by specialists who can increase the odds substantially, and only be released if another set of specialists evaluate his mental state to have, as you put it, won the lottery.
Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds. Also, break the European Convention on Human Rights, which demands that there be a light at the end of a tunnel for everyone: Because denying it, no matter how far away it may seem, amounts to taking away his freedom to free development of personality. In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption. To, if not arrive, at least begin to learn to walk into the right direction. Everybody does.
Who are you to make a judgement on the future of his life while the blood on the knife hasn’t even dried yet? Can you predict the future? Make a judgement for the here and now, instead.
There’s virtually no crime that can be physically redeemed, except for property crimes. Literally any other criminal offense creates an irredeemable injury. But that is exactly why nearly developed country, except for the USA have a redemption-type penal system. How do you measure redemption? Is r*pe redeemed after 4 or 50 years? It will never be for the victim.
But what you can do is try to help everyone to not become criminal again. Because for one, guess what, they’re human too. They weren’t born criminal and aren’t criminal by nature once they’ve committed a crime. They have the right to live their life as much as the guy they killed. Once you have them forfeit their right to a free life, you commit a similar crime. One that in this case is done by objectifying them as an object rather than a subject.
This thinking is the result of hundreds of years of philosophical thinking and seeing the result of your mindset being used by tyrannys.
If they do not pose a danger to anyone anymore and have reformed then they are to be let go. Also in dubio pro reo.
As for minors, their mind is still developing, they may have cognitively known that killing someone is wrong, but they have not yet accepted it as their own moral. Not knowing even the basics of cognitive development of children, I feel like there’s not even a point to discuss with you
Are you sure you replied to the right guy because that’s an argument I made from the start.
If you’re distinguishing by the type of offense instead of by age, you don’t have a youth justice system, you have a minor offense justice system.
Distinguishing by the severity of the offense is already part of the justice system.
Youth justice systems explicitly consider the age and maturity of the offender, not just what they did.
Also I’m not sure why a 15-year-old is a kid in one of your examples and a “kid” in the other.
This is not about tolerating behavior, it’s about reforming people to become members of society instead of lifelong burdens for the justice system.
Despite the severity of his action, brandishing kids as “irredeemable” not only throws away their entire future but also burdens everyone else with keeping them contained forever.
That profits nobody.
The worst thing that can possibly happen is they reform their lives and some kid decides they are worthy of emulation.
No, the best thing they can do for society is remain locked up for the rest of their lives.
People like you should be locked up
Ooh, edgy.
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.
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with that.
You’re a psychiatrist then, I take it?
You’re essentially saying that this kid is beyond ANY help at all. That’s a horrible opinion to hold, and it’s wrong. It’s a 15-year old. Teenagers are extremely volatile.
Like are you saying that when you went to school as a teenager, you didn’t witness several people practically wanting to kill others? Those kids managed to control their stabbiness. This kid didn’t. You’re asserting with absolute confidence he will never be able to.
That’s ridiculous.
Hey different person here. But there’s a difference between this and being a typically hormonally hair triggered teenager. It’s a strange comparison to make.
That being said I read the article and only the maximum sentence is life. It’s possible he gets out in as little as 13 years. I for one am hopeful he can get better. And if he can get better, then who can’t? It’s worth it to try
That’s very much my point. My point isn’t that teenagers are especially murder-y, but that they’re somewhat especially emotional.
So the other guy giving up on him before he’s even had a fully developed brain is sad to me. Perhaps he’s a violent shit who will stay a violent shit, and in that case he should remain confined, but like you said, it’s worth it to try to help him.
I don’t think many people know that human brain fully developed in their 20s .
This means as society, the best approach is to keep them captive in controlled environment, gave them all the help to understand why they did they crime, and after they reach adulthood assist if they are risk to society or not.
Yes, thats exactly what I’m saying. It is not normal teenage behavior to stab someone over a conversation. Teenagers are more likely to throw punches, sure, but not pull a knife out and murder someone.
No, it’s definitely not normal to murder someone, but also, you definitely don’t have the authority to say he’s definitely beyond ANY help. That’s the part I find ridiculous, not the part where you think there’s something wrong with him. Of course there’s something wrong with him; he stabbed someone to death. The point is that despite murder being a horrific crime, as a society, we have moved past defining people as singularly evil for all killings.
If he did not know the kid, this isn’t even probably murder — it’s manslaughter. And if crimes of passion basically are things that you consider evidence of people being “outside ANY possible help”, then what, should we just start killing anyone who kills another person? Don’t listen to any reason, anything, just the death penalty for them, even if it was an accident? (Which this obviously wasn’t but this wasn’t premeditated either, meaning it’s not legally murder, that’s just a way for us to emphasise the horrific nature of the crime.)
Here. https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/teippasi-uhrin-painonnostotankoon-ja-upotti-jokeen-paasee-ehdonalaiseen/3336726 it’s a Finnish article, title translates as: “Taped victim to a weightlifting pole and sunk them into a river - gets free on parole.”
When he got out on parole, he moved to the building I lived in. He made friends with me (because I was the weeder in a building of grannies). By that time he was already 50 something I think. Very polite, pretty nice guy to be around, never felt threatened. Made good food. And he asked me about a pound of meth that someone stole from the storage that I too had access to (not his cabin specifically, but the room the locked shacks/cabins are in). Now even back then I had driven a taxi for years in Finland, and knew all manners of criminals. This murderer (who actually did murder as it was premeditated, unlike the kid) definitely got rehabilitated to at least some extent. Never killed anyone again, that we know of, and I don’t doubt he did. He did beat one guy up, but that guy really had it coming and I don’t believe in violence. And I do mean he really had it coming. More sort of a vigilante thing, not random violence. And totally justified. I won’t go into details about that though. I get that this paragraph is now a pretty poor argument from the reader’s point of view, but trustmebro, he was alright, and prison had definitely changed him a lot as a person. Neatest dude I ever knew, spotless apartment, kitchen, fridge. Ate healthy, exercised. Then he got a bit too much into meth again at the time I moved out of the building and then I didn’t really hear from him until he was dead, but he definitely didn’t at least get convicted of killing anyone during those last few years.
The point I’m making is most criminals can be rehabilitated to quite an extent, even if not “completely”. To the extent that they understand not to pull of shit like stabbing people, at least. The kid probably has no idea of the hell he unleashed on his own life. And once he gets to feel that for a few years, I think he’ll be humbled a bit. So I would not say that he is “definitely beyond ANY help”.
It’s an approach known as perpetrator type theory (or “Tätertypenlehre” in German) that was notably deployed by the Nazis to be able to punish people they didn’t like much harder than others, by allowing them to say for example that someone was inherently and unchangeably a murderer and should thus be executed. The crime was essentially just proof of that, what you got punished for, was what some judge deemed to be the innate criminal personality you had. In particular this allowed to hand out lighter sentences to “Arians” and to decide that Jews for example were inherently bad and could thus be punished much harsher for the same crime.
Oh wow, thanks for the information.
Makes sense. A lot. I’ll read up on that, thanks again.
I never said the kid was evil. He very likely has anti-social personality disorder, which we have labeled as sociopath/psychopath in popular culture. You can’t give someone like that therapy. They just have it.
I don’t trust your understanding of psychiatry to be so well versed that you could say with authority that this kid is beyond help.
He may or may not have Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), but that simple fact alone isn’t anywhere near enough to say he’s beyond help.
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/antisocial-personality-disorder/
We have not, and we should never move “past” that position.
Your standards suck. Get some better ones.
Your arguments suck. Get some better ones.
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.
Except, in the long run, it’s not. It’s only cheaper within the scope of one or two election cycles. Over the long haul, weighing the costs and economic benefits of making person a productive member of society again, it’s way cheaper to do that. But nobody ever won an election promising to spend more money now so that we don’t have to spend nearly as much in a few decades.
You are not including the “cost” of recidivism.
If he kills again after you release him, you have to include that “cost” on top of everything you spent to try to bring him back into society. Even if you get the recidivism rate down to an extraordinary 1%, 1% of the value of an innocent life is worth more than the costs of caging a hundred murderers for the rest of their lives.
When you include the typical risks of recidivism, the cost of rehabilitation greatly exceeds that of permanent incarceration.
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.
This implies some sort of racism or hate crime, not a random attack. There may be something more that needs to be done
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”…
The “other” in this case being the predator who deliberately and maliciously inserted his knife blade into a human body for the express purpose of destroying that human.
It’s not psychopathic behavior to decide that such a person constitutes a threat, and should be separated from society by any necessary means available.
What is there to be sorry for?
[email protected] stabbed him.
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And since a 8 year old knows a stove might be hot he should be allowed to drive, drink and smoke ,right? 🥸
That’s just ridiculous. He should be allowed to vote too.
So a basic concept of right and wrong is enough to try someone as an adult?
Yes. This isn’t a kid who made a stupid mistake. They murdered someone in cold blood.
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.
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.
I’d agree, but only for crimes that aren’t fatal/serious enough. Deliberatly killing someone isn’t a thing society should forgive.
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.
It also “takes care of” rehabilitation and redemption.
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.
Well if we’re going to do tit for tat then let’s put this kid to death.
I think punishment comes first when it comes to murder though
Is there any data showing that this is more effective for reducing future violent crime?
Taking a murderer off the streets?
I mean for other people. Of course we can reduce crime if everyone is imprisoned.
Murderers =/= everyone. What a dumbass argument you’re making.
How could you even infer that this was the point they were making? So far off the mark.
They literally said putting a murderer away for life is like locking everyone up.
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.
How does the punishment help the family of the victim?
They are describing revenge but don’t want to say that word.
No, it’s for safety.
These kids targeted poor Ali as they thought he’d ‘jumped one of their mates’ the week before, if they were allowed out and about, they’d likely kill more of the family in their own revenge scheme.
Well what he did was permanent. So unless you can figure out a way to undo it, I think the punishment should fit the crime. Putting him back out on the streets doesn’t help the family either so it’s kind of a moot point.
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Are you serious? He killed a kid, for no reason, in cold blood. He should never walk free ever again.