Since he’s not in backwards place like our great United States.
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Oops. I forgot to do that. My bad.
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I don’t even know how to feel about this, given how often Black minors are unfairly treated and tried as adults in the US legal system.
O_o
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Like all Nazis, he cried like a baby, when caught, but when he was young he marched with the filthy swine, and was very likely proud of it too. Fuck him and all his Nazi fucks!
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And unless the headline’s changed I didn’t think anything was expected re: my reaction. I clicked and got an article about what the headline said it was.
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The only reference at the tip of my fingers is soft news, but that’s a gateway drug into the hard stuff.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164708
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Yeah I think this is something that’s largely been recognized by society to a degree for some time (often you can’t even rent a car if you’re under 25, and young people are now often cautioned to wait until they’re well into adulthood before marrying). The legal system hasn’t really kept pace though, at least in the US. And as @Melz2 notes the trend has actually moved in the opposite direction when it comes to accountability for young people of color, with 12 and 13-year-olds being sentenced as adults.
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I think it goes well beyond that, aside from very compelling evidence that empathy and impulse control are not well formed until you’re well on your way to adulthood, at the end of the day there is a systemic power imbalance that creates ideological destiny, in a way. Your parents and the adults around you have immense control over your upbringing, beliefs, and even access to ideas. Then when you start out in the world as a young adult, you often have very little social capital or direct control of capital to change that immediately. Even if you look someone like Sophie Scholl, as extraordinary as she was, she was the daughter of a Nazi critic. Even the brave are born in brave families. And of course, there are exceptions, but this idea that youth are more culpable because their crimes are more heinous is actually a non-sequitur, and does seem to be born out of American-style vengeance-as-justice precepts. Culpability and seriousness are not directly linked.
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All I care about is that the message continues to be sent: participate in genocide and the civilised world will call you to account no matter how long it takes and how old you are.
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Te message is that as long as you win the war you’re fine. Do you believe These guilty of bombing Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Iraqi or Afghani civilians will ever go to trial?
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Just for clarification:
In Germany, children under 14 are not criminally accountable at all. From 14 to 18, they are tried as juveniles. Between 18 and 21 it is at the discretion of the court, if a criminal is tried as juvenile or adult, depending on his/her personal/mental/social development. It is possible, that the court will later consider him to be an adult. And of course(!!) the age at the time the crime was committed is relevant.
And some commented on the pixelation: This is not only done in juvenile cases. Usually, such trials are performed completely without public access. As long as a defendant is not convicted, his/her privacy is, at least to some degree, respected like that of any other citizen. I find it totally bizarre, that in US media suspects are mentioned with complete name and address, long before they are even tried.
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If you want an actual answer - in Germany since either 1871 or 1923 depending on how you phrase that.
So basically as long as there has been a Germany.
There have been plenty of outrage-worthy lapses in the prosecution (or lack thereof) of Nazi mass murderers, but this particular bit is just the application of a German legal standard that applies to any and all accused who were below a certain age at the time of the crime.
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That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. A great many of my countrymen believe in extrajudicial punishment. Publicly announcing the presumed guilt of the defendant is one of the milder ones imposed.
Boys will be boys.
Have you tried being intrigued by how legal principles we take for granted can fundamentally differ even between democracies?
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I was making a point about how commonplace it is here to prosecute children as adults. I wasn’t actually seeking information.
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Personally, it’s not how he’s being tried as a juvenile that upsets me. It’s that he was allowed by “God” to live out a full lifetime. That upsets me. It’s also one more thing that make me believe that, if there is a God, we are just something He played around with for a bit and then set on a shelf and forgot.
I think @Melz2 is basically saying “if only we lived in a society where a black teenager was afforded the same legal protections as a Nazi war criminal.”
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Thanks, Brainspore; that is basically what I was saying, as incredibly fucked up as that is.
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