John Lindh’s ‘Kid’ Defense

Does it really matter whether John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old American who came to world attention after a bloody prison uprising among Taliban soldiers last month, is a purposeful and coldhearted Taliban warrior or just took a noir detour in his youthful odyssey of spiritual self-discovery? American courts increasingly have lost patience with such nuance in dealing with young criminals.

His parents and their lawyer plead that Lindh, “not much more than a boy,” may have been brainwashed. They’ve opened the family photo album, offering us snapshots of a winsome kid mugging for the camera. They insist that in embracing a radical form of Islam, Lindh was just trying to find himself, to reclaim some of the inner peace and comfort stolen when his parents divorced; that by traveling to Pakistan to study the Koran he was just following his passion.

Even President Bush, who is said to be nearing a decision on how Lindh’s case should be handled, has referred to him as “this poor fellow” and expressed sympathy for his anguished parents. The government could charge the former Marin County resident with treason, which could carry the death penalty. More likely it will charge Lindh, now under guard on a warship off Pakistan, with providing material support to a terrorist organization, which could land him in prison for 10 years. Some people might consider even that harsh, but think for a moment about the tough sentences meted out to other young people convicted of crimes--gunslinging Crips or the 14-year-old who packs a gun and a grudge in his backpack and opens fire at school. Clearly, as a nation we are ambivalent about how to deal with dangerous young people.

Our criminal laws now declare that even boys of 14 are not “poor fellows” from broken or dysfunctional families, as they often are, but junior adults who can deserve adult punishments, even death. Without high-priced lawyers and a orchestrated campaign to win us over, that’s what they can get.

Should we be more sympathetic to Lindh, a child of affluence who admitted that he was with Arab Taliban fighters funded by Osama bin Laden and that he “definitely” supports the religious war against the United States? Lindh is, after all, the same age as many of the Americans fighting against his Islamic extremist comrades. We would never consider these soldiers children.

No one can blame Lindh’s parents for doing all they can to defend their son. But why should U.S. courts judge this boy-turned-Taliban more gently than a boy-turned-Crip?