In Law’s Eyes, 14-Year-Old Is an Adult : Crime: Under new state rule, boy could get life term if convicted of murder.

Fourteen-year-old Tony Hicks is too young for a driver’s license, too young to view an R-rated movie by himself, but now he’s facing a 25-years-to-life sentence if convicted in the ambush slaying of a pizza deliveryman.

Hicks, who has admitted shooting his victim with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, has become the youngest defendant in California history to be looking at hard-core prison time.

A new state law went into effect in January that lowered from 16 to 14 the age at which boys and girls can be prosecuted and sentenced as adults for violent crimes such as murder, rape and armed robbery.

Some juvenile-crime experts believe 14- and 15-year-olds are simply too young to face adult consequences for their actions, no matter how serious.

The prosecutor in San Diego disagrees.

“His age doesn’t make the victim any less dead,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Deddeh said of Hicks, who did not look a day older than his 14 years when he was arraigned this week. “His age doesn’t make the crime any less serious. This was a senseless and callous murder of a real nice college kid who did nothing to provoke the attack and was just trying to earn a living.”

San Diego County Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst said, “No community can celebrate prosecuting 14-year-olds as adults for murder, but it’s something we have to do because of the types of crimes they’re committing. I don’t know that there’s an alternative but to hold them responsible by adult standards.”

Hicks’ attorney, saying he is going to challenge the constitutionality of the new law, refused to enter a plea for his client at the arraignment. Municipal Court Judge Frank Brown entered a not-guilty plea on Hicks’ behalf and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for June 12.

During an earlier hearing to determine whether Hicks would be tried as an adult, the youth admitted firing the gun, but said he was acting under the influence of an 18-year-old accomplice.

The new state law’s only concessions to teen-age murderers allows convicted youths to spend the first years of their incarceration in the California Youth Authority before being transferred to prison. In addition, they cannot be prosecuted on capital charges--even if, as in Hicks’ case of allegedly lying in wait, the charge could bring the death penalty to an adult.

California’s law took effect at a time when the number of children committing murder is ballooning around the nation. In 1993, 16% of all people arrested for murder were juveniles--an increase of 45% from the number of juveniles who were seized on that charge in 1989, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

Last year, 250 juveniles were committed to the California Youth Authority for murder--including one 12-year-old, 11 13-year-olds, 24 14-year-olds and 63 15-year-olds. Convicted murderers are released from the CYA when they turn 25.

Hicks was one of three 14-year-olds who, with 18-year-old Antoine Pittman, schemed to steal some pizza after an evening of smoking marijuana, Deddeh said.

After scouting the neighborhood for an address where the pizza could be delivered, a teen-age girl in the group--who was not implicated in the crime--ordered the pizza from DeMille’s Pizza, a popular mom-and-pop shop. She gave the address, and the four teen-agers waited across the street.

Tariq Khamisa, a student at San Diego State, drove up in his Volkswagen with the pizza but couldn’t find the apartment. From across the street, two of the 14-year-olds stayed hidden while Pittman and Hicks approached Khamisa, with Hicks brandishing the weapon, according to Deddeh.

The apparent plan, Deddeh said, was for Pittman and Hicks to distract Khamisa while the other boys ran across the street and snatched the pizza. But by then, Khamisa already had given up looking for the apartment and was putting the pizza back in his car.

“Tony walked up, got within three feet of Tariq, put the 9-millimeter in his face and demanded the pizza,” Deddeh said. Khamisa defiantly got in his car, even as Hicks followed him and continued to point the weapon at him.

“Tariq started to back up and was rolling up his window when he was shot by Hicks,” Deddeh said. The bullet ripped through his aorta and he died at the scene.

The slaying was an aberration for the North Park neighborhood, old-timers there say. Once a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes, the area now is studded with apartments; only recently have gang members begun to swagger through the area.

Based on tips, Pittman, Hicks and the other two 14-year-olds were arrested within days. Pittman has been bound over for a murder trial because of his alleged complicity in the crime.

Because Hicks allegedly was the actual shooter, prosecutors wanted him to stand trial in adult criminal court, and last week, Superior Court Judge Federico Castro agreed after a monthlong hearing.

That decision was made after a review of five criteria; meeting any one of them would have put Hicks in adult court.

Castro found that the crime was not especially sophisticated, that Hicks might be rehabilitated in the CYA, that he had no significant history of delinquency and that he had not appeared before in the juvenile court system.

But Castro ruled that because of the “seriousness and gravity” of the crime, Hicks was “unfit” for juvenile court and he was sent to San Diego Municipal Court on Monday for arraignment as an adult.

As it was under the old law, the burden was on the defense to show that Hicks should not be tried in adult court. Castro ruled that the defense failed to make that case.

Prosecutors had wanted the other two 14-year-olds tried as adults, but Castro ruled against them in the case of one, and the district attorney’s office then decided not to prosecute the other one as an adult.

In a taped conversation in a police holding cell that was played during the hearing, Hicks told a cellmate he shot Khamisa because he was afraid that Khamisa’s scream would attract witnesses to the botched robbery attempt.

Since his arrest, Hicks has shown little remorse, Deddeh said. “He came to the crime with a lot of history of seeing and experiencing violence, of seeing people who had been violently murdered,” Deddeh said. “And our theory of the case was that he shot Tariq because he felt he had been defied by him.”

Defense attorney Jeff Reilly declined to comment on the case.

Hicks lived with his mother in Los Angeles until he turned 9 and she sent him to live with his grandfather in San Diego, Deddeh said. The grandfather “was a very squared-away guy who tried to impose discipline in his life. And he did pretty well until Tony got drawn into gang life,” Deddeh said.

Three weeks before the Jan. 21 shooting, California’s new law took effect, exposing Hicks to a new realm of consequences.

With the law’s enactment, California is catching up with legal reform elsewhere in the nation, in the face of growing demands that serious youthful crime be answered with adult repercussions.

Only Hawaii still treats 14- and 15-year-olds as juveniles even if they are arrested for murder. Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas may try 15-year-olds as adults for certain violent crimes, but 14-year-olds are still considered juveniles. In New York, a 7-year-old can be tried as an adult for murder.

A majority of states automatically prosecute murder defendants in adult court no matter how young they are--and children are remanded back to a juvenile court only if it is demonstrated in the criminal court that they are too young to face a trial as adults.

Hunter Hurst, executive director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, said he objects to lowering the age at which a child can be tried as an adult. It is better, he maintains, to pour additional resources into juvenile rehabilitation facilities than to sentence children to prison terms, only to face their eventual release as hardened adults.

“If we are that afraid of our children, we are in trouble,” he said.

But Bill Kolender, who headed the CYA for three years before being elected sheriff of San Diego County, is not convinced that rehabilitation is possible for some juveniles, especially if opportunities for early intervention are missed. For some, he said, prison may be the only answer.

“There’s a generation of young people who are incapable of feeling anything for anyone else,” he said. “There are young people who are in fact mature and capable of knowingly killing someone.”