Are We Criminalizing Childhood?

Two Oregon boys are scheduled to go on trial Aug. 20 to face charges of sexual abuse for slapping the butts of female classmates.

The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran -- what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher's aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.

After hours of interviews with students the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental question: When is horseplay a crime?

Bradley Berry, the McMinnville district attorney, said his office "aggressively" pursues sex crimes that involve children. "These cases are devastating to children," he said. "They are life-altering cases."

Mashburn's and Cornelison's behavior admittedly was inappropriate, but the McMinnville D.A. is charging them as if they'd dragged girls into a bathroom stall and felt them up or asked them to perform sexual favors. In short, intent matters, and from what I've read so far there's virtually nothing to suggest these boys engaged in anything other than childish antics (it should also be noted that some girls apparently were in on these stunts, as well).

If anyone deserves to be on trial here, it's Bradley Berry, who initially charged Mashburn and Cornelison with felony sexual abuse (as if the boys had actually raped the girls). The boys' defense attorneys have rightly filed prosecutorial misconduct charges with the court, alleging that Berry unfairly selected Mashburn and Cornelison for prosecution and added charges when the boys refused to plea bargain.

When Berry states that his office "aggressively" pursues sex crimes that involve children, one has to believe he's referring to laws that were written primarily to protect children from predatory adults, not from other children. This certainly isn't to say these laws can't apply to children who commit crimes against their peers in proportion to those committed by adults, but one would be hard pressed to argue this is the case here. And one would think a district attorney, of all people, should know the difference.

Comments

[Tom L]

Trevor,

I hate to say this, but I am not at all shocked by this story. If you give State officials this kind of power they will use it in unintended ways.

This kind of story is proof positive that the State cannot be reformed through a better selection process or whatever. This is the logical outcome when the mechanisms such as the ones bearing on this story are implemented.

The jury will be instructed to only judge these boys based on the laws they're being accused of breaking, there will be no discussion in that courtroom of the applicability of that law to this situation, i.e. jury nullification.

They are purely at the mercy of the judge in this case and whether or not he believes the case should be thrown out.

Ta,

[trevor]

Oh, absolutely.. And it's situations like these (which probably occur much more than we're aware) that account for my widespread skepticism when it comes to granting the State with any amount of authority and power.

Laws can't be subjective, but the inherent contradictions lie in the fact that prosecutors and judges have to apply them subjectively - in short, you win some, you lose some. And even in the cases when people win against such long odds, how many lives and families are ruined in the process?