What happened to Luis Ramirez should never happen to anyone of any color at any time anywhere. It was a tragedy of the worst kind. It broke my heart when I read about the 25-year-old illegal immigrant who was allegedly beaten to death by teenagers Brandon Piekarski,16, and Colin Walsh, 17. Another teen, Derrick Donchak, 18, was charged with aggravated assault in the killing, along with ethnic intimidation and other counts, including providing liquor to the other boys the night of the confrontation. All were members of the local high school football team. Donchak was their quarterback. Now, the three boys look to spend the rest of their lives in the American prison system for something they did while they were children.
What they’re accused of doing is horrific. This young man that was murdered lost his life for all the wrong reasons. Because his skin was dark. He was not a citizen of this country. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong punks.
If these boys did what they’re accused of doing, if they racially taunted Luis Ramirez, and then beat him to death, they should be punished severely, no mistake about it. They took the valuable life of another. They have to learn from their mistakes.
But at the same time, one day they should also be given the chance to demonstrate an ability to rehabilitate. They must be allowed at least an opportunity to escape their tiny confines of brutality and violence, get their lives back together, and become productive citizens, something they were incapable of doing in adolescence. But here in America, children who are convicted of committing serious crimes often end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. The United States is the only country in the world that sentences its children to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
There are 2,484 of them – American prisoners – who were sentenced as juveniles and who will never be considered for release from an adult prison again. Nor will they ever have an opportunity to demonstrate that they have been rehabilitated.
California has nearly 300 such cases. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, leads the country with 444, nearly one-fifth of the national total. That’s why Piekarsky, Walsh, and Donchak appear to be in such serious trouble. The crimes they’re charged with took place in a small coal-mining town called Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Should the prosecuting agency follow the national trend, these boys could be as good as gone. For life.
However, hope – something that is generally nonexistent to a child sentenced to prison for the rest of his life – might be on the way. The Judiciary Committee of the Pennsylvania Senate began holding hearings today in an effort to reeaxime this practice in light of psychological and developmental research, international standards, and national trends to the contrary.
You see, legally speaking, the medical issue is that brain-development research has confirmed what psychologists and others have been saying for many years – that the key parts of the brain associated with judgment and decision-making remain undeveloped throughout adolescence, meaning that children, as a group, must be considered legally less culpable than adults.
The areas in the brain responsible for controlling impulse behavior are the last to mature, which means children find themselves far more susceptible to peer pressure than do their adult counterparts. This results in a diminished capacity to recognize the long-term consequences of their actions. And it also means kids are more capable of rehabilitation.
As their brains evolve and change, kids have more potential for growth and reform. And isn’t that really the bottom line of what a civilized society should be about? We don’t have to lock them up and throw away the key forever. Some children possess an amazing capacity to be able to learn from their mistakes.
Besides, many who were children when they began serving these Draconian sentences were sentenced under felony-murder statutes, where they didn’t mean to kill anyone, but someone was in fact killed during the commission of a less serious offense. Others, who weren’t directly responsible for the killing, were convicted under theories of accomplice liability.
By eliminating such sentences for children, an opportunity to demonstrate their growth, development, and rehabilitation could be created. It would also give the child, and in many cases, his family and community, something far more important than social justice: Hope. A hope, however slim, that things could change. Right now, there’s very little hope for a child who knows he or she is going to spend the rest of their life in prison.
I doubt these “boys” will receive significant sentences. Both are out of prison and at home. They murdered a young father and now they are at home.
There are several hate groups backing these “boys” and are trying to blame the victim. They should receive some punishment, more than just staying home til they are 18.
Who teaches these young people to hate people of color? If we do not learn from incidents like this then when will we ever learn that racial hatred is wrong? They are currently charged with 3rd degree murder. They should be found guilty and serve a minumum of 5 – 10 years in prison. No one is asking for a life sentence, just a lesson for these “boys” to understand it is never right to murder anyone, regardless of skin color. Right now, the boys, their mother and many in their community believe they should go scot free!
It would be such a tragedy if these boys were allowed to escape punishment if they are fould guilty for what they’ve been charged with. This case is a tragedy. The entire community needs to learn from this, and these boys need to learn how to transend the anger and hatred that filled them before this terrible incident took place. These boys could made a world of difference, for them and their families, if they are given the proper guidance for transformation.
I don’t know where to start. I human life was taken by some punks. They beat up a human being until he foamed at the mouth and died of the injuries/swelling of the brain. Why are they at home? It hurts me deeply to see this kind of garbage occur. They killed a human being. They are home tonight. You want to give them a break. How about no death penalty as their break and instead, 20 to life. They are grown at 16. There are senior citizens that do not make sound decisions either. I bet you can find countless (older) persons that could not reason the way you could as a young ADULT. How could you come to their defense? How about defending children of all melanin concentrations. Our justice system is in bad shape and so is our judgment.
This case is a tragedy of the worst kind. I hate what these kids are supposed to have done. If guilty of the charges, they deserve to be punished severely.
I just want to see a justice system in place that actually has some compassionate rehabilitation process to give kids who mess up badly a chance at getting their lives straightened out. Our zero tolerance mentality does not accomplish this.
These racist scumbag teens need to rot in prison.
Stolen boy,
I commend you for writing a sensitive and well-reasoned post about our criminal justice system and the way it treats juvenile offenders.
Sadly, I have to [regretfully] side with some of the more critical commenters—not because I disagree with you in principle on the question of how our [juvenile] justice system works, but because I don’t think that Donchak, Walsh, and Piekarsky are the best examples with which to make your [very articulate, rational, and well though-out] argument. (I wrote several posts on this story on my own blog.)
As some of the other commenters have pointed out, the boys who are accused of killing Luis Ramirez have, at every step of the way, been protected by their town’s legal system, not excessively punished. Local police put off arresting the accused for a whole week; the police chief tried to downplay the seriousness of the crime by arguing it was not a hate crime (“From what we understand right now, it wasn’t racially motivated. This looks like a street fight that went wrong”); prosecutors were similarly reluctant to bring hate crimes charges or charge them with the highest degrees of assault and homicide; the borough manager, a public official came to their defense (“I have reason to know the kids who were involved, the families who were involved, and I’ve never known them to harbor this type of feeling”); and, as others have mentioned, these boys are [free] at home awaiting trial. I doubt Luis Ramirez would be out of jail panding trial had he beaten a White teenager to death in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania?
So while the general trend is that our justice system is overly punitive [and unreasonably cruel] when it comes to young offenders, the Luis Ramirez case brings up the opposite possibility that these young people—who, from all appearances beat and killed Luis Ramirez because of how he looked—might get off with a slap on the wrist.
i’m friends with brandon and i believe what he did was right
Kelsey: El que seas amiga de Brandon, no lo exculpa del asesinato de un mexicano, y más que un mexicano es una vida humana, no hables de derecho, nadie tiene derecho de asesinar a las personas. Te hablo en español, ojalá te civilices y civilices al sistema de justicia de tu comunidad, deberia darles vergüenza
Michael,
I look at your picture, and you look like a well-off middle-aged caucasian male.
I, on the other hand, am a US citizen, but not of caucasian origin. To know that two high schoolers (who are obviously old enough to know that murder is a crime) are allowed to get away with hating on a minority and beating him to death freightens me.
Since I’m a minority, is it okay for high school students to beat ME to death?
You’re damn right these kids need hope. They need to be shown a society of justice where criminals are punished for their wrongdoings. Not punishing them would further reinforce the fact that what they did was not wrong.
The immigrant victim’s family, are the ones who need hope.
Truthfully, this case is one of the most tragic scenarios I would ever wish to see. All of these people are victims. They are victims of unconsciousness. I couldn’t imagine how Americans would feel if an American young man were in another country and then beaten to death just because of the color of his skin. The hatred that would lead young boys to do such a thing is unfathomable. But life does not cheat us in any way. Those who hurt others will face similar repercussions in their own existence. I’m glad to see that these boys did not get the death penalty. But there is no doubt they need to be punished. They also need to recognize that their negative energies hurt everyone around them. So do their parents? Their parents’ unconsciousness led to their kids unconsciousness, that led to the murder of a young man because of his color. And what’s up with the way the DA charged this case, and tried it? Again, we need a system that does not punish, but rehabilitates. One that is underlined with compassion and tolerance, care and love. That is our only way. That is how to reach someone at their inner core. And until we terminate the punitive style of the prison paradigm, we will continue to destroy pretty much everyone we incarcerate, kids included.
Since when is “unconsciousness” a substitute for common sense?
Common sense has no application for those who are spiritually unconscious. You can see by the results thereof.
They should die, in the same way they killed. This is how god intended man to live, with responsibility for his actions. There is no doubt they murdered one man as a pack of animals, Satan is going to have a blast with these little evil inhuman brats. The jury could have saved their souls by helping them repent but instead sealed their fate to burn in hell.
eye by eye tooth by tooth…
Thankfully, justice will be served. These two boys are due in federal court tomorrow facing life in prison. The fact that a man died at their hands, beaten with a piece of pipe and then kicked in the head with such force brain matter oozed out of his skull during surgery, kinda trumps their story that this was “a brawl gone wrong”. They didn’t shout racial slurs at a Mexican from a car; this was a modern day lynching. They beat an innocent man to death. Oh and saying: “If he wasn’t here illegaly, this wouldn’t have happened” is exactly like saying if a girl who is raped didn’t dress a certain way, she wouldn’t have been raped. Spare me your feeble arguments.
They will not get off lightly, especially since one of the four boys involved in the fight admitted in state court that the attack was racially motivated. All he has to do is repeat that testimony in federal court, and we can lock these two cumstains up and throw away the key!
Mr. Mehas, Do you have any clue about the facts of this case, or are you from some long time Shenandoah family? I would suggest you read up on what happened and rewrite your article. You can start with this: Mr. Donchak has spent 70 days of his State sentence thus far (he was due out on the State charges in February 2010) in solitary confinement for breaking prison rules (AP 12/22/09) and was admonished by Judge Mannion who said, “It’s not exactly appearing that you’re getting the point here, and that’s something that’s hard to understand”. I think the same is true for you Mr. Mehas, you just don’t get it either. I side with an earlier poster who said, “Its the Immigrant families that deserve hope”. I also say thank God that the three dirty, good ole boy cops, one of whom was dating a suspect’s Mom, are under indictment themselves for obstruction of justice (that’s an understatement).