Imagine this: It's the second week in March, 2000, just days after the election. A fifteen-year-old boy named Alonza Thomas walks into a convenience store wearing a bandanna over his mouth and nose. He's carrying a gun. He places the gun against the clerk's chest and demands money. Another clerk tackles the boy and a struggle ensues in which the gun is fired leaving a tidy hole in the store rooftop. Plaster and dust sprinkles on the combatants while the boy is subdued.
Here are the facts: It is the boy's first crime. His record is as clean as an upscale restaurant. He is alone. No one was hurt.
Well, here are “my facts” based on this information: He chose to walk into a store wearing a bandanna to hide his identity. He also chose to carry a gun, a deadly weapon. (He is only 15 years old and decides he’s going to use a gun to intimidate or hurt another human being.) He sticks or jabs the gun in the clerk’s chest and demands money. As another clerk tackles him, a struggle ensues and the gun goes off. And everyone involved is damned lucky that no one was killed or maimed.
Stephen Elliott continues:
Alonza pleads guilty to second degree robbery, admits to a personal firearm use violation, petitions for a remand to juvenile court. But there is a problem. The laws have been changed. March 2000 is an off-election. The voters of California have just passed the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act of 1998, AKA - Proposition 21.
Quick education. Proposition 21 has two primary extensions. The first takes crimes where the presumption was that a child would be tried as an adult and removes the discretion of the prosecutor and the court, mandating the youth enter into the adult correctional system. The second, and here is where Alonza Thomas comes in, takes crimes committed by juveniles where the child could be tried as an adult but the presumption is that they would be tried as children, because they are children, because as a society we know what a child is, we know the difference between a child and an adult and the potential of youth, it takes these cases and allows the prosecutor to file the case in adult court, if the prosecutor so desires. And this is what happens to Alonza Thomas.
It's really not so complicated. A fifteen-year-old boy sets off to commit his first crime. He's a bumbling criminal, his chances of success were never good. Where are his friends? There is evidence of psychological trauma, but isn't there always? Who is this young Jesse James and where did he get his gun? Who cares? The boy is sentenced to thirteen years in adult prison. There will be no school, no rehabilitation.......(He is ) not even eligible for education courses offered to adults because the child populations has to be kept separate from the adult population until they turn eighteen, at which point they are mainlined into the system. There is no doubt Alonza will come out worse then he went in.
Well, I was robbed at gunpoint last year by, what I described at the time, as a 15 - 20 year old Hispanic male. I was late to work that morning. As I turned onto our street where our office was located, the would-be assailant was walking in the middle of my driving lane. I sized him up right away. A young guy like that at 9:30 a.m. on a Friday should be at work or at school. As I passed him, I knew I had passed him too closely and I felt mean, vicious anger directed at me. I knew I had to get into my office up the block before he met me at the door out of sheer timing. As I pulled up to park I was gathering everything I needed to take into work and the thought of the kid on the street left my mind. Poof! This was my unconscious decision that would change my life.
I made the mistake of getting out of my car. And as I came around the front of my car there he was, casually walking down the sidewalk. Hands in his pockets, faded jeans too big, puddled down on his tennis shoes, a winter coat two sizes too big with the hood up over his head. And in one split second -- 1/4 of a second, his head turned and his eyes from underneath that hood met mine. I saw his body language change -- he turned on his heels and came at me. And in that moment I knew I was about to experience something that I’ve always thought about. That a lot of women think about. A violent person, his only intention, to do me harm.
We were completely alone on the street. He was screaming. He was profane. His spit flying in my face. His face was so close to my face that his pretty brown eyes and his white teeth are burned into my memory. He was violent. He was raging. At that moment in my life I was facing down violence personified.
He pulled a black gun from his pocket as he continued to scream and swear at me. He pointed the gun at my head. “Looking down the barrel of a gun” is a cliche, but when it happens to you, it is an original, terrifying truth.
I cannot write sentences well enough to truly make you feel what it is like to have a gun pointed at your head. To know that all they have to do is pull a trigger and you could die. It is utterly terrifying. This is my “flashback” moment that can make me cry a year later -- sometimes out of the blue -- as it’s so easy for me to imagine -- and to hear that violent gun going off.
My entire life did not flash before my eyes, but the face of my son did. And I threw my purse at him as hard as I could, hitting him in the chest. This shocked him. But as he was gathering everything up that had fallen out on the sidewalk, he continued to scream at me and point the gun.
Every cell in my body was leaning to the right, trying to get away from him. He was irrational, still screaming, but there was no where for me to run.
He had the gun. He was in control. And as I begged him to leave me alone, he all of a sudden decided to do just that. He ran away. Not quickly though. The memory of his confidence as he ran away still disturbs me.
Within the next 24 hours after this robbery, I considered all of the possibilities for this kid. In my state, there is a mandatory 7 or 8 year jail term if you are convicted of a gun crime. I knew immediately that if he were arrested and convicted, he would come out of jail a worse threat to society than he is right now.
I figured he had to be from bad circumstances -- why else would he have chosen this sort of lifestyle? I wondered about his mother. This boy with such beautiful eyes? How could she not care more for him than to let him end up this way?
For the next three months, every time there was a murder in the city, they would call me to come and look at mug shots. That experience in and of itself was enough to make me lose my mind.
I quickly lost confidence in the detective assigned to my case. I believe to this day that I could have found this kid, given all of the circumstances surrounding the investigation that I won’t get into in this post. In my short experience with the criminal justice system, I observed a million and one problems.
I agree with you that a 15 year old, first time offender should not be tried as an adult. It is beyond belief that we do not even attempt rehabilitation. I agree with your statement, “There is no doubt Alonza will come out worse then he went in.” And I appreciate that you are an advocate for kids like this. God knows they need someone on their side.
But you have to consider the victims of crime. Your arguments would be stronger if you did.
Your simple facts: His record is as clean as an upscale restaurant. No one was hurt.
These statements are very misleading and arrogant. The “upscale restaurant” crack is flippant and degrading to the victims. Because when there’s a person -- no matter their age -- using a gun, making a threat -- it’s not only hurtful, it is destructive. And remains destructive for years after the incident.
The kid who robbed me not only stole my purse that held irreplaceable pictures of my child, he stole my confidence, my freedom of movement, my trust and my sense of safety.
Victims of crime deserve that recognition.
Oh, and by the way -- I don't sleep that well at night anymore.
Luckily, your perspective, while not unique, is still relatively rare. But only someone who has lived it can explain it. Good post.
I tend to be more lenient in my assessments of these things, good Lefty that I am, but it certainly doesn't hurt to take in all info from all sides and come up with solutions that don't offend the victims.
To me, the real problem is the attempt to legislate absolutely everything (criminal penalties, etc.) which ties the hands of all involved in the "pursuit of justice" - which is hard enough to obtain without having options taken away from the suspect, the victim, and the system.
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | May 24, 2005 at 04:35 PM
I grew up (and by "grew up" I mean from my mid-teens) in Chicago, in a highly-patrolled but still hazardous South Side neighborhood. I got jumped only once, by 3 underage kids, half a block from my house, and only by raising holy hell (and after they had kneed me in the balls), did they run away. I subsequently wandered the streets at night, for years, and without incident, but with eyes in the back of my head and ears cocked and knowing every block and alley and posture of anyone a quarter-mile away.
I knew way too many women - fellow students, workers, guests - who had been raped (and they were not being careless) to know that as a not-small guy I could walk around with an advantage. Even that didn't prevent the annual burglaries, which seemed to get past every security measure installed after the last one, and which increased in malice as the kids who broke in got older. We had a pretty good idea of who was responsible for the break-ins (as did the cops), but you have to catch these guys in the act in order to nail them, and even reformed Chicago cops couldn't do much more than shrug and sigh in the aftermaths.
Much, much worse for me was my first experience of domestic violence, in LA. A very swift education in psychos (you can learn a lot in 6 months, and street-smarts have nothing to do with it). I'll tell you, though, that the women I knew were the best guides through that experience, and I tried their patience - the process itself is agony, and it doesn't work very well, and when you have no experience of violence, it's far too easy to go numb, turn into a zombie. I needed a lot of talking to.
My sleep isn't disturbed any longer by any of this, and the scabs are long gone, but there are scars. Don't wake me suddenly, or I'll cry out and shatter some glass.
Posted by: grishaxxx | May 24, 2005 at 04:42 PM
Blue Girl,
I know how it feels to look down the barrel of a gun. I also looked down the shaft of a knife at the same time. I was double-teamed by a pair of thugs one night in Boston.
And I wasn't the least bit scared.
I wasn't brave. I was just too surprised. I literally couldn't believe it was happening. I even said to the muggers that I was amazed at their choice of mugging spots. Nobody would ever expect to be mugged here, I said. They weren't impressed by the compliment.
The point is that these guys were bad dudes, and I wish they'd been caught and sent to jail, but their crime didn't include terrorizing their victim. Only by accident though. So should they have been punished less than the guy who mugged you?
Maybe.
Juries and judges are supposed to take everything into consideration to reach their verdicts and impose sentences, including the fact that the victim was a short woman in one case and a six foot tall man in another.
Terrorizing you was a foreseeable fallout of his crime and choosing you over someone like me makes his crime more dastardly.
But judges and juries have to take into account his thinking and character too. This is why mandatory sentencing is a bad idea. The crime against me was not as vicious as the crime against you, although on the books they look the same.
The fact is that the two guys who mugged me might really have been worse criminals than the one who mugged you. My guys might have been perfectly willing to kill me if I'd put up a fuss like you did. Your guy, despite his show of violence, might have run away if you'd put up more of one.
Who the guy is and what he intended matters, if it can be determined.
That's why that dopy kid was done an injustice. All the facts weren't taken into consideration. Just his act.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | May 25, 2005 at 04:24 PM
Lance, who you callin' short?
Ok. Ok. So I'm vertically-callenged. And so was my bad buy -- at 6' tall, you coulda kicked his butt! How I would have loved you to have been there --
I'm confident that with your quick wit, he would have not run away with my new purse. The one that that I got swindled into buying by the obnoxious saleswoman in NYC just a couple of months prior. (In the big picture, NOT that big of a deal, but ya gotta understand, no one else in this city had such a gorgeous, unique over-priced bag! Grrrr.)
For all the reasons you write about above, I am confident I would be a thoughtful juror. Except the point about the punishment being tied somehow to the reaction of the victim. No matter my stuttering or your verbal Ju-Jitsu, they had deadly weapons and were, ultimately in control.
How lucky we are to be doing this important "blog" work now! If our brains would've been splattered on the sidewalks, oh well...only a small circle would've cared, I guess.
Since starting this blog, I've learned it's not enough just to have an opinion, or be able to somehow get it into words for the blog world to read.
I've also learned that I better gosh darn be able to frame an argument, while writing well.
Darn you! You force me to write more and think more. Since you've put the proverbial gun to my head, here goes.
My point was not to defend mandatory sentences proposed by a politician trying to get re-elected on the platform of being "tough on crime."
My point was Stephen Elliott's way of writing about this kid.
Here are his phrases:
"He places the gun against the clerk's chest..."
"places?" -- please: jabbed, stuck, shoved -- even "poked" would've been better.
"...the gun is fired leaving a tidy hole in the store rooftop."
"tidy?" -- yeah, I'm not up on the exact wording of how fast a bullet, a projectile meant to rip something to shreds, flies out of a weapon, but a "tidy" hole?
"As it blew through the roof" -- sounds better to me.
"Plaster and dust sprinkles on the combatants..."
"sprinkles?" -- Makes me want to bake sugar cookies for my Grandma.
"combatants?" -- Did these guys know when they took the job at this convenience store that they were also signing up to be soldiers? They are not this kid's equals in crime -- they were hired to be clerks, not combatants.
"His record is as clean as an upscale restaurant." Grrrr. I do not like this line at all.
"No one was hurt." -- Completely narrow-minded. All it takes is a little imagination.
My batteries running low, I'm going to have to finish this later.
In the meantime -- have a safe trip to Boston this weekend.
Posted by: blue girl | May 25, 2005 at 09:06 PM
Blue Girl,
What quick wits? I'm telling you, my wits weren't working. That's why I wasn't scared. If I'd been thinking I'd have been terrified.
But because I wasn't scared, what they did to me wasn't as bad as what that guy did to you.
But it was.
Except it wasn't.
I wasn't hurt by my mugging. You were hurt by yours. It's really possible that no one was hurt in that stick up.
I can understand why you are bothered by Elliott's word choices, though.
And I make *you* think? What do you suppose you do to me? I was happily losing IQ points by the day until you showed up.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | May 25, 2005 at 10:08 PM