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I want to hear someone say they want this 9-year-old to get the death penalty. I know someone is thinking it.
Whottt?
Just heard this story now, quite tragic.....can be found here
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/ny...gewanted=print
The 9-year-old girl's mother was gone only briefly Monday, running upstairs to the 11th floor to borrow a hair-straightening comb to help give the girl braids before a barbecue downstairs in the courtyard.
The girl was playing with one of her closest friends, with whom she spent so much time that some thought they were related, an 11-year-old named Queen Washington. Everyone called her Queenie. In the 9-year-old's apartment on the seventh floor of the Linden Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, the two girls began to fight over a ball, the police said.
As any parent will tell, even the gentlest child has an occasional tantrum. But the 9-year-old, while bright and inventive, struck some of her neighbors as a different kind, a girl who often showed flashes of nasty, violent anger when she did not get her way.
"As long as things go in her favor, she was a sweet, beautiful young girl," said Kahindą Lannigan, 42, a retired home care worker who lives in the girl's building. "But when the tides were in favor of other children, she'll hit, kick, scratch, scream and spit. She'd hit anyone on the head with a bottle if she was fighting. She'd beat them any way she could."
Still, the adults who knew her said yesterday, no one would imagine her capable of killing.
The police said the 9-year-old stabbed Queenie in the chest with a steak knife. The blade perforated the older girl's heart, killing her as she stumbled out of the apartment and tried to make it to the elevator down the hall, the police said.
The 9-year-old appeared in court yesterday afternoon in a white T-shirt and blue jeans and with her hair pulled up, mistakenly taking a seat at the prosecution's table until she was directed to the defense table next to her mother. In a quiet voice, she stated her name and her age for the record.
Her defense lawyer, Nicole Barnum, said she expected that the girl would be formally charged with manslaughter. The girl was taken to a juvenile detention center.
After she was stabbed on Monday, Queenie made it about 40 feet down the narrow hall before she collapsed onto the pale linoleum. A neighbor, Dakim Hunter, 24, was at home when a friend knocked on the door and asked, "Why is that little girl lying on the ground?" Mr. Hunter immediately recognized Queenie, her chin to the ground, and when the two men prodded her and tried to lift her up, they saw blood on her shirt and called 911.
"When I called her name, all she said was, 'Uh,' " Mr. Hunter said. "Those were her last words."
Meanwhile, the 9-year-old girl seems to have walked past her fallen friend and stumbled, dazed and barefoot, outside, standing for a time beside a police and fire call box on Wortman Avenue in front of her building at No. 185, neighbors said.
"She looked very scared and confused," said one neighbor, Mic e Figgs.
Inside the building, her older brother, who is 15, ran out of the apartment and upstairs to the 11th floor and told his mother that his sister had stabbed Queenie. The two rushed back downstairs to their apartment, with the girl's mother hysterical, crying and vomiting, Mr. Hunter said. The girl's mother had been in the upstairs apartment for only four minutes or so, said Thomas Davis, 23, the neighbor who had lent the comb.
The two girls mostly got along fine, neighbors said, although Mr. Davis said that they scrapped at a birthday party two months ago, and that the 9-year-old's mother had told Queenie's mother, " 'If you keep bringing her over here, they're going to keep fighting.' "
And yet, as recently as Sunday, the two girls could be seen playing together. They stopped Kiara Scott, 19, a former baby sitter for the 9-year-old, and asked her to help them make up a dance to a hip-hop song. "They said 'Come back later,' and I didn't," Ms. Scott said. "Anything can happen in the blink of an eye."
The baby sitter, and others, described the 9-year-old as a bright and pleasant girl when things were going her way. She liked playing a children's game on the family Nintendo, and otherwise spent her free time as many other girls do: "Listen to music, dance, or go to a friend's house in the building or go outside in back of the building and play," Ms. Scott said. The 9-year-old and her older brother were close, and she took care of her younger brother, neighbors said.
But considering that anonymity is the norm in most New York apartment buildings, the girl made an impression on a remarkable number of her neighbors, largely because of her outbursts.
Ms. Lannigan, the neighbor, repeated a story circulating in the building about a confrontation between the girl and a teacher over a stolen cellphone. Teachers and others at the girl's school would not discuss her yesterday.
Ms. Lannigan said Queenie looked out for her younger friend: "Queenie would jump in and fight for her." For that reason, the killing stunned her all the more, she said. "I can't believe it would happen to her, because she was the only one who would tolerate and play with her," Ms. Lannigan said.
Another neighbor, Diva McPhatter, 44, a food pantry worker who lives on the same floor as the 9-year-old and her family, said she saw the girl break a glass juice bottle and use it to threaten another girl in the park near the building last summer. "She broke it and told the girl she was going to kill her," and called her an obscenity, Ms. McPhatter said.
One schoolmate, a 10-year-old boy, said the girl gave him his first and only black eye.
On average, about six children under the age of 10 have committed murder or non-negligent homicide a year in the United States since 1976, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston. "They do occur," he said, "but they are rare."
The girl eventually left where she was standing by the call box, went back in the building and, still barefoot, went to Mr. Davis's apartment on the 11th floor, looking for her mother, Mr. Davis said. She told the man, " 'I had a fight with my cousin. I just stabbed her,' " he said. He asked her where, and she said she did not know. A neighbor arrived to take her downstairs.
By the time she returned to the seventh floor, the police were there, and they would not allow her into the apartment, Mr. Hunter said. "She was crying. She was saying, 'I want my mother,' " he said.
Yesterday in court, mother and daughter embraced for more than 10 seconds as the hearing began, with the girl's mother saying, "Oh, my baby." And after, they hugged again, the mother telling her daughter, "I love you, baby."
Reporting for this article was contributed by Ann Farmer, Jennifer 8. Lee, Colin Moynihan and Anahad O'Connor.
I want to hear someone say they want this 9-year-old to get the death penalty. I know someone is thinking it.
Whottt?
Man, I'm going to sit back and watch the responses to this thread.
Who's going to be the first one to make the obligatory "she knows right from wrong" observation?
That 12 year old boy in Florida that killed his six year old cousin was sentenced to life, but then later got a year's probation and house arrest under appeal. He held up a pizza delivery boy last week (house arrest, remember?) and now that he's 18, I'm very curious to see what Florida does with him.
So I guess there's a little precedent, but I dunno what NY thinks of what Florida did.
No death penalty, sure, but something a little stronger than a couple of years in juvie and an ankle monitor.
Well what do you think should happen to this little girl Manny?
Well...
just to play devils advocate...
is this girl any less dead and murdered than Emmett Till?
why the disparity in emotional responses? because it was black on black? girl on girl?
I think the difference is those men were in their 30's or 40's. This is a 9 yr old little girl. While yes they're all murderers, you will never find a state that will put her on death row.
An idea I heard that I liked was to give this girl life in prison. And, keep her in juvy until she turns 18. Then tell her that you will suspend the life in prison to let her out on her 18th birthday. But, if she ever once more in her life commits another crime, then that life sentence that was postponed comes back. With no chance for parole.
OK...lets say it was your daughter that got stabbed in the chest with a steak knife and bled to death in the hallway...
still feel so magnanimous?
Well, what happens to these kids?
Man, I've pounded my head against the proverbial wall enough times, so I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I'm not sure there is a solution to be had with a 9 year old child that kills someone else. But I do not believe for an instant that a 9 year old child understands the ramifications of her actions, nor will she understand the ramifications of any punishment dealt out. She needs help, and that is the bottom line. Justice in this case doesn't involve prison time, it involves saving the life that is left.
Don't twist that into me saying she doesn't need to go into prison.
As far as the death penalty, it's illegal for anyone under 18.
Where do you draw the line?
If she was 17 and this happened, would death penalty be okay?
13?
9?
(and yes I understand that adults only get the penalty)
nevermind
Last edited by MannyIsGod; 06-01-2005 at 04:12 PM. Reason: someone else edited too!
Wasn't trying to twist you into saying anything. Just wanted to know what your opinion is because for sure you had to have one.
especially considering that she had already been seen threatening to kill another child with a deadly weapon...
That remark wasn't directed at you. It was said out of experience in dealing with these type of discussions on this board and others before. I've grown to know what to expect as a response.
Here's some interesting reading on young murderers:
http://www.karisable.com/youngmurder.htm
Ok cool just making sure, I also know how these boards get and that some people are pretty quick to get pissy
Manny...I am not advocating the death penalty for this girl...just pointing out the reality of the situation.
She killed a girl.
She obviously did it on purpose.
There is no "good" solution to this unnatural situation.
what will happen to her? Probably a few years of Juvie where she grows up even harder, faster, and tougher...and kills again when she gets out...are we as a "good hearted" society "taking pity" on a "child" then collectively responsible for the next death?
I don't think she should go to Juvie. Send her to a mental ins ution or something of the like. Like I said, I'm not sure there is a way to fix up a 9 year old child that has killed, but I can gaurntee you the way the system is set up now is going to end in utter failure.
A 13 year old that killed a four year old in upstate NY is in prison, convicted of 2nd degree murder, 9 to life. Eleven years later, he's still there.
Two 10 year olds in England killed a 2 year old in '93. In 2001, they were granted release on parole after being provided with false iden ies, concealed by law. They spent 8 years, 4 months and 10 days in secure local care homes.
The 12 year old kid I mentioned earlier in Florida was given life without parole, but then in '04 the sentence was lowered to a year of house arrest and 10 years probation.
Three different scenarios. Which do you favor?
She should be impaled on a sharp stick and displayed for public viewing.
I favor solutions that don't involve a number 2 pencil and a scantron.
That case pisses me off. Those two 10 year olds were fully aware of what they were doing. They don't deserve to be in a "witness protection" program and back in society.Two 10 year olds in England killed a 2 year old in '93. In 2001, they were granted release on parole after being provided with false iden ies, concealed by law. They spent 8 years, 4 months and 10 days in secure local care homes.
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