Prosecuting children

Trying a child as an adult has a long history in all countries that have laws protecting children.  Some crimes it is because it is outrageous that a child could do the crime and get a lesser sentence than an adult would.  But the laws for protecting children who commit crimes are there for a reason.  I have stated before teenagers are brain damaged, their minds are being reconstructed and their judgement center is being redesigned and it's pathways are reformed, so the use of judgement is delayed.  Add that many crimes with youth are committed in groups, there is a peer pressure component.  I know, you hear your parents and yourself recite the phrase, "… if your friends were all jumping off a cliff would you do that too?". The answer to that question is, yes, yes you would jump off the cliff too and every adult as a teenager would have been jumping off that cliff too, and you know it.  You can say you wouldn't have but that is the you sitting in front of a screen, not you surounded by your friends and you being unsure of your social position.  Now add a mentor figure of an adult saying that it is alright to do this dumb thing, you will do it and rare is the teenage that would say no, I would say unheard of except as someone with Autism and being distrustful of my peer group who believed that the same peer group was trying to harm me, but that is a special case.

Okay, let's say the Prime Minister of Canada mouths off to President Putin and launches an airstrike into Russia and it kills thousands civilians, and Russia declares war and invades Canada.  And during the fighting, however brief, one Canadian teenager is attacked and wounded but throws a grenade and kills two or three Russian soldiers, who each have years of training and expertise in warfare.  The teen is captured, healed of his wounds and put on trial for murder, because he killed some soldiers in a war zone during a war, who invaded his country.  Sounds kind of far fetched does it not, yet change a few names and this is what happened.  Add a few things to that like after he was captured the teenager was tortured and kept in a prison where the rights of prisoners was not respected and all he had to do was confess to his 'crimes' and he would be released to a friendlier country, where he would no longer be tortured and he would have his rights of a human restored.  Omar Khadr.  Go look him up.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr