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| Convicted of Child's Play
by John M. Curtis Copyright February 1, 2001
While most fair-minded people deplore violent crime, they still accept mitigating circumstances, including the murky developmental period known as childhood and adolescence. Was it so out of line for Tate’s defense attorney to argue that his 13-year-old client lacked the maturity to really know what he was doing? The entire juvenile justice system is built on the premise that there’s a fundamental difference between adults and children. Fashionable as it’s become to try children as adults, that still doesn’t undo crimes or change the basic fact that children are not little adults. It’s one thing to push a 17-year old into adult court, but still another to try pubescent children as adults. Reams of scientific literature prove beyond any doubt that children are developmentally different from adults. With vivid imaginations steeped in fantasy, children simply can’t recognize the consequences of their actions. Any attempt to assign adult responsibility to puberty-aged children defies 100 years of research suggesting otherwise. While his mother Kathleen Grossett-Tate—a Florida Highway Patrol trooper—apparently slept upstairs behind closed doors, young Tate confessed to flinging Tiffany Eunick around the living room like a rag doll, apparently play wrestling in his suburban townhouse. When he came to his senses, her lifeless body sustained massive contusions and internal injuries. “A brutal, savage beating,” insisted Ft. Lauderdale prosecutor Ken Padowitz, impugning willful intent to the pudgy, overgrown pre-adolescent who left his victim with a fractured skull, lacerated liver, broken ribs, internal bleeding and multiple cuts and bruises. Padowitz presented a strong case that the 12-year-old Tate was nothing less than a cold-blooded killer, fully in charge of his faculties while beating his victim to death. Common sense tells any parent—or rational person—that 12-year olds lack the intellectual maturity to fully comprehend the consequences of their behavior. Sure, adolescents have some sense of right and wrong, but watching them play reminds most parents that they’re not simply miniature adults. Despite the brutality, defense attorney Jim Lewis argued that Tate’s attack was inadvertent play, inspired by his obsession with professional wrestling. Trying to prove his point, he even tried to subpoena WWF stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Steven “Sting” Borden to testify but was rebuffed by Broward County Judge Joel T. Lazarus. Filing a libel suit against Lewis, the WWF tried to vindicate its good name. But what’s slanderous about body-slams, dangerous acrobatics, and stomping on someone’s head? Without passing any judgment, that’s exactly what wrestling fans watch every day of the week. While young Tate certainly picked t | |||||||
o matter how horrendous the crime or public outrage, children still belong in juvenile court. Throwing the book at 13-year-old Lionel Tate, a Ft. Lauderdale jury made history convicting a pubescent boy of first degree murder for the throttling death of 48-pound 6th grader Tiffany Eunick. Rejecting defense attorney Jim Lewis’ “wrestling defense,” the 12-member panel dismissed lesser charges of manslaughter and 2nd degree murder, finding the teenager guilty of first degree murder for a crime committed at the tender age of 12. “It was horrible, really horrible,” said juror Kathleen Pow-Sang, “if there was any way that we could have gone with a lesser offense, justified it in any way, and we wanted to . . . ,” proving, if nothing else, that boys and girls can be convicted of adult crimes. “This is a reactionary response to an increase in juvenile crime that began in the early 1990s,” said Laurence Steinberg, a researcher studying youth violence at Temple University in Philadelphia.