Good grief!

In a previous post I noted a story coming out of the SF Bay Area about two kids being convicted of felony assault and battery for shooting a spitwad at another kid. Some juicy quotes included:

Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, said the criminal prosecution "is another example of our society moving toward criminalizing kids. I don't know what purpose this serves."

Macallair said the incident "sounds more like a typical schoolyard prank that resulted in an incident in which someone got hurt" as opposed to an intentional act of violence.

Attorneys for the boys said today that they will appeal the convictions pending a June 6 sentencing hearing in Martinez.

"What we have is an unfortunate accident with injury to a child, but what one time had been horseplay has now been, by the D.A., elevated to felony status, just on the basis of the unfortunate outcome of an accidental act" said Pittsburg attorney Marek Reavis, who is representing the older child.

And I said:

The closing quote from the boys' father is pretty spot on: "Things just went too far. Kids cannot be kids anymore."

Well, shame on me for forgetting that it sometimes helps to have all the facts in hand, because now we have:

These two boys no longer boys

Somebody had to do it. Jeffrey and Stephen Figueroa had built up shocking resumes of intimidation, disregard for authority and mischief.

Neighbors feared them. School authorities repeatedly warned them. So when Jeffrey, then 12, shot a sharply pointed spitwad that permanently damaged a classmate's eye, it became the catalyst, the thing that was finally going to make these boys accountable.

Their parents hadn't done it. The school hadn't done it. Everybody wanted to cut these kids one more break. That's our instinct, here in the sunny, clean-cut suburbs. These are children; surely they didn't mean it.

The article lists the number of times both boys had come to the attention of school and juvenile authorities...and nothing was done. Testimony in court was that they essentially terrorized their neighbors, other children, etc....and nothing was done. So the judge in their latest bit of "mischief," their "horseplay," decided that enough was enough.

I especially like the community service portion of the sentence: working at the Lion's Club center for the blind.