Skip to main content
Justice today:



Boy, 13, faces 8 years for spitwad / Walnut Creek 7th-grader's missile injured another student's eye



After an investigation, the Contra Costa County district attorney filed identical charges against each of the Figueroa boys in December: battery causing serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon, assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury and mayhem.



Last Tuesday, Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Araceli Ramirez found Stephen guilty of misdemeanor battery. Jeffrey was found guilty of battery causing serious bodily injury and mayhem, both felonies.



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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...
1 comment
Read more

John Wick: Chapter 4

No sense in playing coy, this is a great film. I’ve seen it twice and while I don’t quite love it in the way I love the first, original John Wick , it’s my #2. It’s a little overlong, has some wasted space and time, has one absolutely pointless and useless character, and generally ignores the realities of firefights, falling, getting shot, hit, etc. All that notwithstanding, it’s a great action flick, has a genuine emotional core, and is well worth your time if you’re into that sort of thing. Like I am. Summary: John Wick (Keanu Reeves), last seen saying he was fed up with the High Table, goes to war to obtain his freedom. Some of the most incredible action scenes ever filmed ensue, culminating in a very satisfactory finale and a devastating post-credit scene. The first Wick film was a surprise hit. It was a simple, straight-forward tale of vengeance told in a simple, straight-forward manner. Where it stood out was its devotion to human stunt work, on exploiting long camera shots that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

DVD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Awful. The film is an environmentalist wacko wet dream. No one else could like this thing. I’m trying to think of something positive and all I can come up with is how positively awful it is. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a science fiction masterpiece. In it, Klaatu comes to Earth with a simple message: Do what you want among yourselves and on your planet. But if you attempt to export your violent way to the stars, Gort and his friends will hit you with so many lefts you’ll beg for a right. (Gort being the cosmic version of Chuck Norris, you see.) The ultimate warning was that we needed to change our violent ways if we expected to be accepted among the stars. In this remake, the aliens are environmental busy-bodies who have bought into the entire notion that we puny little humans are capable of destroying the planet. Therefore, we must be eliminated so that the planet, for God knows what reason, can try again. To count the ways in which this film makes no sense ...
1 comment
Read more