Barbaric Florida: 14-Year-Old Sentenced to Life w/o Parole Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Afghanistan has the Taliban; The US has ... "Juvenile Justice" ?? Any "Justice" ??? Friday March 9 1:50 PM ET (via yahoo) Florida 14-Year-Old Sentenced to Life in Prison By Maryanne Armshaw FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Reuters) - A Florida judge sentenced a 14-year-old boy to life in prison on Friday for the murder two years earlier of a 6-year-old girl, rejecting the defense's request for a retrial or a reduction in the verdict that would have meant a lesser sentence. In a case that has stirred controversy over what punishment a person so young should face, Broward County Circuit Judge Joel Lazarus ordered Lionel Tate to serve the state's mandatory sentence for a first-degree murder -- life in prison without parole. Tate was tried and convicted by a Broward County jury in January in the July 28, 1999, death of playmate Tiffany Eunick. Although Tate was only 12 years old at the time of Eunick's death, he was tried as an adult, since in Florida juveniles charged with serious crimes may be prosecuted as adults. The defense said the girl died accidentally while Tate was rough-house wrestling with her. But the prosecution said the injuries she suffered were far too severe for this to have been the case. The jury agreed in its conviction and so did Lazarus in his sentencing statement. "The acts of Lionel Tate were cold, callous," the judge said. Lazarus had the option of reducing the verdict to second-degree murder or manslaughter, which would carry a lesser sentence, or ordering a retrial. But he rejected both in a strongly worded sentencing statement. Tate, a heavyset boy with a round face, was in court for the sentencing, dressed in beige jail clothes. He listened silently to the verdict before being escorted from the court room. Case Far From Over It appeared his case was far from over. Prosecutor Ken Padowitz said after the sentencing that Tate had been "correctly and legally sentenced for first-degree murder by this court" and defended his decision to prosecute Tate as an adult. But he said he would join the defense in making a clemency appeal for a lesser sentence to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of President George W. Bush. Padowitz said Florida judges should have discretion on sentencing when facing cases of juveniles convicted in adult trials. Tate's appeals lawyer, Richard Rosenbaum, said he would definitely be appealing the case. The boy's attorney for the trial, Jim Lewis, said Tate was too young to have understood that the fun of playing with the girl could have harmful consequences. "I can only imagine the horrors this child is now going to go through," said Lewis. "The bottom line is he's been in an adult jail and now he's going to an adult prison." Lewis argued during the trial that the boy had been trying out moves on Eunick that he had seen performed by professional wrestlers on television. Tate's lawyers have been backed by civil rights groups like Amnesty International in arguing that life in prison is too severe a punishment. A key twist to the case was that Tate's mother and the boy's lawyer, Lewis, turned down a pretrial plea bargain from a prosecutor under which Tate would have pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served three years in juvenile detention and 10 years' probation. Tate's mother, Kathleen Grossett-Tate, said last week that she and her son had had no idea before the verdict was handed down that he might face life in prison without parole, adding that she never thought he would be convicted. On Friday, she told the court, "People say I am a fool not to accept the plea from the state, but how do you accept a plea for second degree-murder when your child was just playing?" Asked after the sentencing what he might have done differently during the case, Lewis said "a hundred things," immediately adding that he should have convinced the mother to take the plea bargain. "That was a great plea offer ... If we could snatch that plea bargain back ... it was fair then, it is fair now," he said. During the morning, Lazarus rejected a defense request for Tate to be evaluated for legal competence -- in other words whether he understood what was going on in court. The defense has argued that Tate did not comprehend that he could go to prison for life if found guilty. "The concept of a life sentence is unpleasant but not overly complicated," Lazarus said, adding that it had been only after the conviction that the issue of Tate's competence was raised. At a sentencing hearing last week, the father of the dead girl appealed emotionally for Tate to be locked away for the rest of his life. "Now everyone is pleading for him as though he is the victim," the girl's father, Mark James, told the court. "He is the criminal." Tate was convicted of first-degree murder because under Florida law, a person can be charged with felony first-degree murder when someone dies during the commission of another felony -- in Tate's case, child abuse. Defense attorney Lewis has argued that the law on child abuse was never meant to be used in that way. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-03.10.01-11:25:26-13196