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.
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.
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.
This isn’t a whole life sentence but 13 years and then parole for the rest of his life.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sorry, but at 15 you’re old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
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.
What is there to be sorry for?
Pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online stabbed him.
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.
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.
But instead we just lock up the criminal, because it’s cheaper.
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.
We can’t fix our society until the government stops prioritizing profit over health and education.
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”…
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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? 🥸
This implies some sort of racism or hate crime, not a random attack. There may be something more that needs to be done
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
“They fucked up”. Means they did something really bad.
As far as I know while “fucking up” can be used in cases of accidents it generally implies culpability and that is the way in which I intended to use it.
No, you’re trying to play it off as the other commenter pointed out, as if it’s just kids will be kids.
You don’t accidentally stab someone to death. This wasn’t a “fuck up,” if you read the article, or even what I wrote in the comment above, you’d see that the kid followed the victim around after they had already tried to disengage from the guy with the knife.
Knife guy sought them out, escalated the situation despite the victim and his group trying to get knife guy to leave them alone, and then stabbed him in the chest.
Where’s the accident in that?
“They fucked up”. Means they did something really bad.
Not really an accurate definition. Without accuracy, mistakes will be made.
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Sure glad the mod removed this post. Which made me want to read it by clicking “source”. So I read it. Backfire much?
