A California
judge ruled Thursday that 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, the
accused slayer of 15-year-old gay classmate Lawrence King,
will be tried as an adult. Ventura County superior
court judge Douglas Daily denied a defense motion that
sought to transfer the case to juvenile court on
constitutional grounds. McInerney's arraignment, also
scheduled for Thursday, was postponed until August 8
to permit his attorney, senior deputy public defender
William Quest, to petition the appellate court for
immediate review of Daily's ruling.
According to
witnesses, McInerney shot King in the head on February 12
during first period in a packed classroom at E.O. Green
Junior High School in Oxnard, a largely blue-collar
port city of 200,000 about 60 miles north of Los
Angeles. McInerney was charged as an adult with
premeditated murder with a special hate-crime allegation
under Proposition 21, a controversial 2000 law enacted
by ballot initiative that affords district attorneys
more or less unfettered discretion to try juveniles as
young as 14 as adults for certain felonies.
As Quest
explained in a courtroom interview with The Advocate
in June, the motion to try McInerney as a
juvenile rested on the argument that charging
"Brandon as an adult to result in a
51-[years]-to-life sentence [would be] cruel and
unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution. Quest acknowledged at the time that
previous challenges to Prop 21 had failed but said
none had been based on Eighth Amendment grounds.
In a telephone
interview with The Advocate before the hearing,
Quest said, "I think we have merit to our argument,
and I think we have a legitimate basis for our argument, but
it's going to take a strong court to go against
the D.A."
At Thursday's
hearing, Quest contended that if McInerney were convicted,
the judge would be required to impose the 51-years-to-life
sentence, and would not be permitted to take into
account specific mitigating circumstances, such as
"what was going on in [McInerney's]
life" or the victim's conduct.
"You are in effect neutered by the law," Quest
told the judge. Quest argued that while this might be
permissible with adult defendants, it constitutes
cruel and unusual punishment when applied to a
juvenile.
Prior to the
hearing, senior deputy district attorney Maeve Fox, who is
prosecuting the case, told The Advocate that
Quest's chances of winning his motion were
"slim to none," adding the issues it
raised "have all been ironed out" in previous
cases.
In court, Fox
said, "the law doesn't allow murder at any
age." She contended that it would be
inappropriate for the court to make any decision based
on McInerney's alleged "special
circumstances" before any evidence about those
circumstances, or about anything else, had even been
taken in the case. Daily agreed and denied the motion,
expressly holding Prop 21 constitutional.
The district
attorney's decision to charge McInerney as an adult
has been controversial. "We've had
boatloads of letters and e-mails on both sides"
of the issue, Fox said. In a widely reported April letter to
district attorney Greg Totten, more than 20 LGBT
groups, including Lambda Legal, the National Center
for Lesbian Rights, the Transgender Law Center, the
Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, and the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, "call[ed] on prosecutors
not to compound this tragedy with another
wrong" and to "treat the suspect as a
juvenile, and not as an adult."
Fox, however,
adamantly defends the decision. "Do you want
[McInerney] living next door to you at 21?" she
asked rhetorically in the Tuesday interview.
"When you were 14, when you were 10, when you were
8," she continued, "did you know it was
wrong to kill someone? The answer inevitably is yes.
And I understand that he's 14, but for someone, at
that age, to premeditate and deliberate this kind of crime
and pull it off in front of their entire class I think
is cause for serious alarm. And I understand that
people are compassionate towards him, and I am
compassionate towards him, and I don't necessarily
think he should spend the entirety of his life behind
bars, but he should spend a good long time behind
bars."
Fox pointed out
in a previous interview that "14- and 15-year-olds
cannot receive life without the possibility of parole
in California," which means that McInerney
could be freed at some point even if convicted and
given the maximum sentence.
Quest sees the
issue differently. "If you ask a 10-year-old,
'Is it wrong to steal?' typically
they'll say yes," he said.
"But...let's say they're at a
store and they may have these urges [and] they don't
think it through, they don't have the ability
to go through a cost-benefit analysis that you do as
you get older. And so it's kind of like hot and
cold cognition, and there's a lot of research on
that. If you ask them while they're eating
breakfast in a very calm situation, right or wrong,
generally kids can say that. Obviously, is murder wrong?
Yes. But in a hot situation . . . the emotional and
physical capacity to think things [through] clearly is
limited when you're an adolescent. Therefore you
have diminished culpability."
Asked how
McInerney's having allegedly premeditated
King's murder by bringing a gun from home to
school squared with notions of "hot and cold
cognition," Quest responded, "Obviously
I'm going to have to defend this case if we go
in adult court. And how I do that, I don't want to
get into it.... It's going to be a difficult
case within the laws that govern adults."
On another front
in the case, a hearing has been scheduled for August 11
on Quest's bid to obtain King's records from
the school and from Casa Pacifica, a residential
facility for troubled children where King was living
at the time of the murder. (Peter DelVecchio, The
Advocate)
