Boy, 15, who fatally stabbed teenager he did not know in Birmingham is jailed for life
Boy, 15, who fatally stabbed teenager he did not know in Birmingham is jailed for life
Muhammad Hassam Ali, 17, was killed by stranger after a four-minute conversation in city centre
Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
This is genuinely disappointing. I understand the need for punishment, but unless there is therapy, a path to recovery and reintegration into society, we're just housing more and more people without a future.
I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
Yes? What do you think they're implying, that we should try to rehabilitate criminals... but only if they're still young?
I think (and forgive me if I'm wrong) they're essentially saying that without a rehabilitory justice system, we're just locking people up for life and creating a net drain on society. Financially, culturally... it's a morale drain on our nation, even.
Not to mention that as a society we're abandoning a person who, through a justice system built on rehabilitation and not some ye oldie Catholic concept of creating a punishing Hell on Earth, could actually flourish one day, adding to our society instead of taking from it.
A prison system designed to simply incarcerate, punish and torture those it touches will never offer anywhere near the same benefits to us as one that is designed to attempt to rehabilitate.
Not everybody can be rehabilitated, of course, but that's like saying we shouldn't try to treat cancer, because not everybody can be cured.
This implies some sort of racism or hate crime, not a random attack. There may be something more that needs to be done
What about the other teenager? The one who died?
He never gets to go home, he'll never be part of society again.While that's obviously very sad and tragic the purpose of criminal justice should never be vengeance or an eye for an eye. It should be about rehabilitation and reintegration. Yes it's awful that a life was lost but functionally removing another life from society for forever is hardly a good solution.
Oh no, someone died... I guess the only solution is to provide free housing and food to the criminal, while not providing anything else he needs ensuring he'll stay a piece of shit that does nothing but steal from society and will likely end up killing more. /s
Even a death sentence would be better at this point! Playing the emotion card falls flat if your solution is even worse.
Well if we’re going to do tit for tat then let’s put this kid to death.
Are you serious? He killed a kid, for no reason, in cold blood. He should never walk free ever again.
It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.
In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.
When I was 15, I knew it was wrong to stab people. It's not like getting into a fight on the playground. When you bring out a knife, or any deadly weapon, you immediately escalate things way beyond what school administration can handle.
As a kid, I knew there were crimes I could do that were just "boys being boys." Smoking weed, petty theft, vandalism, even getting into fist-fights. I also knew there were crimes that were off limits, such as rape and murder. Just about everyone around me knew the same thing, too.
You're advocating for a culture that encourages kids to commit more crimes and more serious crimes than they otherwise would because they know they will get off easy.
It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.
The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.
The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.
Your prescription seems to assume that either:
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Everyone can be rehabilitated, which no society has ever achieved.
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That it's preferable to push a well understood risk to people's lives back into the community than it is to keep that risk in the care of the state where they can't kill more people.
...but you strike me as too sensible to prescribe that kind of thing, so what have I missed?
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This isn't a whole life sentence but 13 years and then parole for the rest of his life.
Why the fuck should he get a second chans on life when his victime never will ? If it where my son who where dead I wouldn't settle for anything else.
Fuck em.
The victim got a life sentence. They're gone. I'd be fine with him being executed. There's ZERO remorse over filth like this. 15 is developed enough to know they literally killed someone.
Locking them up helps all the other people they won't have the opportunity to hurt or kill
Locking you (and everyone making similar comments here) up would also help all the people that you won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill. Because how can I know that you won’t ever commit a crime like that?
The idea that you can get security by simply locking everyone up who commits a crime is delusional and for the outcomes you only need to check the US.
The kid fucked up.
They should be rehabilitated slowly and serve their time and then be reintegrated into society when they show they are ready to be and have served sufficient time.
They shouldn’t be thrown away for 70 years.
The kid fucked up.
He stabbed someone to death, he didn't accidentally total his step dad's Corvette.
The man he killed is never going to go home again, and he's not going to do anything for the next 70 years. His family will spend every holiday without him, every milestone in their lives passed without him.
Because "the kid fucked up." 🙄
Yes, the crime was horrendous. But if society just gives up on the idea of rehabilitating criminals that's not going to bring anyone back. It's just going to hurt more people unnecessarily, innocent and otherwise.
Obviously the murderer should not be released until they are adequately rehabilitated (if they ever are). But in a just society prisons are for rehabilitation.
Sadly, this seems like it's likely a case of psychopathy. Technically you can't diagnose minors with it, but they have pre-adult terms for the same thing.
Children at that age, at least according to the majority of modern research, have extremely low rates of successful behavioral reconditioning towards socially acceptable norms. It's almost zero.
The best researchers have been able to do, even with extremely intensive treatment, is to slightly curb their most violent and predatory tendencies.
I agree that we should take a non-retributive approach to justice, but the sad truth in these cases, at least as far as we know right now, these folks cannot be fixed and reintroduced into the general population, they are too dangerous.
Their brains, either through genetic misfortune, or through extreme sustained trauma from infancy, are permanently malformed. They lack any significant capacity for empathy or love. They cannot relate to other people on any level, especially emotionally. Their brains are literally not wired for it, as awful as that is.
We shouldn't throw them in a hole though. They should be permanently imprisoned in specialty facilities that constantly treat their mental disorder and try to employ them in productive jobs that can help society. They should be provided proper medical care and resources, possibly tightly supervised short term release in condition of exceptional behavior and treatment response.
Good.
We should not let acts of violence like go unpunished.
We need to set an example for anyone else who may be thinking about committing the same thing.
Isn’t boy 15 just another way to say teenager?