Girl's Death Draws Hard Look at Penalties for Violent Juveniles
CARROLLTON, Ga. — 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.
