The recent crime case involves a 15-year-old murdered, Ms. Alyssa Bustamante, who was convicted of killing her 9-year-old neighbor, Ms. Elizabeth Olten. A victim was severely stabbed in the deep and dense wood separating their houses in Missouri. Such an overwhelming criminal case implies the elements of both age and mental illness presented by the young female homicide. Ms. Bustamante was examined by several mental health professionals, who asserted that she has suffered from a major depressive disorder and has a borderline personality disorder (Hernandez, Ferguson, and Kennedy, 2020). Despite that perpetrator is a minor with mental illnesses, a judge has sentenced her to life imprisonment with the possibility of conditional release and a consecutive sentence of thirty years.
It is crucial to analyze why the judge charged Ms. Bustamante as an adult with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, even though she was a minor and an adolescent when committing the crime. According to Chermak and Bailey (2016), the state of Missouri is the only state in the United States adopting a “dual jurisdiction” system (p. 132). Perpetrator’s attorney aimed to make her tried as a juvenile and kept them in a juvenile facility to receive appropriate treatment and increase her rehabilitation chances. However, under Missouri juridical guidelines, Ms. Bustamante is obliged to serve 35 years and five months in prison before she can be eligible for parole.
In my opinion, the court mishandled the case because juvenile crimes should be analyzed separately from adult criminal acts. According to Briggs (2020), neuroscience disclosed that juvenile brains are less prone to assess the potentially severe consequences of their misbehavior. Therefore, it can be regarded as unfair treatment of juveniles when sentencing them for a lifetime. She was a mentally unstable minor who should have first received urgent rehabilitation since the teenagers cannot employ the same rationalization or understanding, or even impulse control similar to an adult. The legislative bodies and judicial powers must incorporate the altered perception of juvenile delinquency into the legal framework of the United States.
References
Briggs, B. L. (2020). Children are our future: Resurrecting juvenile rehabilitation through “Raise the age.” Legislation in Missouri, 85(1), 1–38. Web.
Chermak, S., & Bailey, F. Y. (2016). Crimes of the centuries: Notorious crimes, criminals, and criminal trials in American history. ABC-CLIO.
Hernandez, K. A., Ferguson, S., & Kennedy, T. D. (2020). A closer look at juvenile homicide: Kids who kill. Springer Nature.