Girl’s Death Draws Hard Look at Penalties for Violent Juveniles

While supper was cooking Monday night, police here say, a boy strangled Amy Yates with his bare hands, leaving her body in the tall weeds of an empty lot.

On Wednesday, residents of this conservative, rural area just east of the Alabama border expressed horror at what had happened.

“He seemed like a normal kid to begin with, but it turns out he’s a monster,” Tim Yates, Amy’s uncle, said. “He’s a monster.”

The boy, whose name was not released, is being held in a youth facility.

Carroll County prosecutor Pete Skandalakis said that because the boy was 12, the stiffest penalty he could face under Georgia law if convicted in the death of 8-year-old Amy was two years in juvenile detention.

Neither the Yates family nor law enforcement officials, Skandalakis said, would be satisfied with such an outcome.

“In Georgia, a 12-year-old could walk into a school and gun down teachers and students and you do not have the option of prosecuting” him as an adult, Skandalakis said. “Under the age of 13, our hands are very much tied.”

Anne Proffitt Dupre, a specialist in child law at the University of Georgia, said that unlike Georgia’s adult justice system -- which mandated particularly harsh sentences for violent crimes -- the state’s juvenile justice system was wholly geared toward rehabilitation. Underlying that law, she said, is the assumption that children do not commit society’s worst crimes.

Federal court decisions gradually have softened penalties against children and teenagers. In 1988, the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for children under age 15, and the justices soon may abolish it for 16- and 17-year-olds.

“People don’t want to think that children are capable of acts like that,” Dupre said. “The law is struggling with this.”

Neighbors at the trailer park where Amy and the boy lived said Wednesday there had been plenty of signs that he was violent.

He often told neighbors that his father beat him, sometimes with a baseball bat, said Shelly Bowman, 27. Police had visited the park when the boy was accused of stealing, and he was so rough with other children that Bowman had threatened to call the police, she said.

“There’s no way you should draw your fist out to hit my 4-year-old, who was just playing,” she said.

As the sun set Monday night, the 12-year-old was agitated, Bowman said. She had asked him to leave her trailer because she didn’t feel her kids were safe around him. Leaving for the grocery store, she left orders with the baby-sitters not to allow him back inside. He pounded on the window, but they did not let him in, she said.

“It upset him real bad,” she said.

Meanwhile, in the nearby trailer with a rabbit cage and inflatable pool outside, Amy’s father had given her permission to go out and play.

“Thomas had told her to stay close by. He was cooking dinner,” said Cristi Knighten, who is engaged to Tim Yates.

By 7:30, when Bowman returned from the grocery store, the Yates family was asking if anyone had seen Amy. Neighbors emerged from their trailers and searched the area. Three hours later, Bowman watched police carry a body bag out of thick weeds and underbrush behind the trailer park.

“It tore me up,” Bowman said.

On Wednesday, after a juvenile court judge ruled there was cause to detain the 12-year-old, people in the neighborhood were stunned and quiet.

But others vented their rage on talk radio, demanding severe punishment for the boy.

But prosecutor Skandalakis said he had found no way under Georgia law to seek a punishment beyond two years.

If the boy had been just a few months older, the situation would have been entirely different, Skandalakis said: Georgia’s “seven deadly sins” law, which laid out harsh minimum sentences for violent crimes, allowed prosecutors to try 13-year-olds as adults.

Although prosecutors have complained to legislators, there has been no move to toughen the state’s juvenile justice laws. “There’s nothing in between major and minor punishment,” Skandalakis said.

In 1993, two 10-year-old boys in Liverpool, England, kidnapped 2-year-old James Bulger and beat him to death. Three years ago, the boys were released from state custody, supplied with new identities and relocated.

Four years ago in Florida, 12-year-old Lionel Tate pummeled a 6-year-old playmate to death. Tried as an adult, he was convicted of first-degree murder and received a sentence of life without parole.

An appeals court overturned the verdict, and Tate was released into his mother’s custody early this year. But Florida lawmakers have refused repeatedly to change the state law that allows 12-year-olds to be receive mandatory minimum sentences of life with no possibility of parole.

Even among these cases, Amy’s death is especially troubling, Dupre said, because manual strangulation is such a violent way to kill.

“You’ve got to be up close to do that,” she said. “It’s a very personal, violent act. You don’t do it by accident, and you have to work at it to make it work.”

The paradox of young children committing violent crime poses a challenge to the justice system, said Michael Mears, an Atlanta death-penalty activist.

“How do you punish a 12-year-old for a crime like this? It’s beyond me,” he said.

Sloan reported from Carrollton and Barry from Atlanta. Times staff writer Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.