A Boy’s Face, a Man’s Crime

Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel Brazill wore a shirt and tie for his trial for the shooting death of his middle school teacher. His muted green dress shirt was so new it stood stiffly away from his chest, the creases from packaging visible as he rose Wednesday to face the jurors who declared him guilty of the adult crime of second-degree murder. Brazill now awaits sentencing and could serve as long as life in prison.

The law that allowed Brazill to be tried as an adult fits him and other violent teenagers as awkwardly as his new clothes. Certainly his crime was indisputably, heinously adult. The boy, who had been suspended from school for throwing water balloons, returned with a handgun and fatally shot Barry Grunow, a popular English teacher, after Grunow refused to let him into a classroom to say goodbye to two girls. Brazill was 13 years old at the time.

Florida, like most states now, gives prosecutors enormous latitude in charging juveniles as adults, subjecting them to adult punishments. California, with the passage of Proposition 21 last year, moved in the same direction. So Brazill was charged with first-degree premeditated murder. The teenager claimed the shooting was an accident, that he meant only to cock the weapon, not fire it. The jury settled on the second-degree verdict, perhaps reflecting its discomfort with the prospect of a mandatory life term for a 14-year-old and its skepticism of the boy’s explanation.

These cases are wrenching. A youngster, in a fit of pique, guns down a husband and father and now faces many years, possibly life, behind bars. Two lives destroyed.

Brazill is the second Florida teenager tried as an adult and convicted of murder in five months. The first, Lionel Tate, was sentenced to life in prison in January for beating a 6-year-old playmate to death when he was 12 years old; he now awaits a clemency hearing.

These cases raise hard questions. They should at least prompt lawmakers to pay as much attention to sentencing and rehabilitation of youths as they have to charging.

What should we do with Nathaniel Brazill and other violent teenagers? If we lock them up for 25 years in adult prisons or even in gritty youth facilities, how safe will we be when they’re finally released?

Part of the answer is to return to juvenile judges some of the charging and sentencing discretion over youthful offenders that lawmakers and voters have so eagerly handed to prosecutors. Vastly better mental health and educational services for incarcerated youths would increase the chance that a functioning adult, not a career criminal, eventually walks out of the prison.

In the meantime, Barry Grunow is dead and Nathaniel Brazill, a boy just barely shaving, is face to face with the wreckage of his own life.