He’s 9 years old and facing the long and astonishingly well-funded arm of the law. So far, we’ve sent the boy to a psychiatrist and to a psychologist and next month, we’ll pay for him to see another shrink.
If she agrees that the boy might – might – be made competent to stand trial, we’ll spend six months teaching the kid about the court system so that we can make him pay his debt to society.
Or, we could just make him pay his debt to society.
Actually, we can’t do the latter. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has a policy against such things.
Fortunately, money is apparently no object in this county – pay no attention to that $32 million hole in the budget – and so we are spending thousands to bring this 9-year-old to justice. And, apparently, others like him.
“I see this all the time,” said Robert Dodell, Matthew’s taxpayer-supplied attorney. “Do I think it’s a waste of money? Yeah.”
A spokesman for the County Attorney’s Office says it’s rethinking the policy.
Matthew is a fourth-grader in El Mirage, a soft-spoken kid who loves basketball and skateboarding. A kid who had never been in any trouble until October, when he and three friends decided to deface the neighborhood park with graffiti. Damage estimate: $200.
A few days later, he was called to the principal’s office during math. Waiting for him was an El Mirage police officer, who read him his rights and released him to his parents after he admitted to using a Sharpie to write his initials and one other thing – police say it was an obscenity, Matthew says it was “Sk8″ – on the playground.
Matthew would face his day in court, but first he would face his parents, Christine and Paul, who were none too pleased with their son. “We grounded him,” Paul said. “He wasn’t allowed to play basketball, video games or anything like that for a couple of weeks. What he did was wrong, and he knew what he did was wrong.”
In December, Matthew was summoned to juvenile court, where his parents expected that he would admit his wrongdoing and be ordered to clean up the park. They were all for that.
But attorney Dodell, after talking to Matthew, felt the boy wasn’t competent to stand trial given his age, and so Judge Janelle McEachern ordered a mental-competency evaluation.
Apparently, Dodell was right because the two doctors agreed that the boy doesn’t understand enough about his rights and such to stand trial.
One of the two, however, felt that he could be “restored” to competency – taught enough about court proceedings to face the judge.
The result: Matthew has been ordered to see a third doctor next month – a “tiebreaker.” If she agrees that he can be made competent, we’ll be sending a “restoration specialist” to his school for up to six months, to tutor him about the system.
Dodell says it’s a complete waste of money, but a necessary one. The courts have no choice but to do a full-blown mental-competency exam – the same one given to the St. Johns kid accused of two murders – because the County Attorney’s Office has a policy against putting kids like this into a diversion program.
“In a diversion program, it would probably be some community-service hours, pay for it, and maybe write an essay or attend class on why this is terrible for the community,” Dodell said.
In other words, the same punishment that any judge would likely order, just minus the thousands in psychiatric, legal and “restoration” bills.
Mike Scerbo, spokesman for the County Attorney’s Office, said that the no-diversion policy for graffiti has been in effect since 1995. On Thursday, he defended the policy, noting that the act of writing graffiti is a big problem and adding that it wasn’t the prosecutor’s call to order mental exams.
“It’s the judge’s discretion as to how to deal with the case,” he said. On Friday, Scerbo told me the office is developing a diversion program for such cases.
It probably won’t come soon enough for Matthew, who on April 16 will meet with yet another psychiatrist. No worries. Just put it on our already overburdened tab.
We’re good for it.
We are good for it, aren’t we?
Via:www.azcentral.com
It’s only been running since Saturday, but someone has already painted graffiti inside one of the Valley’s light rail trains.
