Updates On A Couple of Past Stories

I've posted on a couple of So Cal teen tragedies in the past few months, and yesterday there were legal updates on a couple of cases:

First Story: Local Teens Killed On the Way to a Dance - The DA has announced that he will not seek criminal charges against the teen driver in this accident which killed two high schoolers. Probably the right decision. As a former teen driver, I'm sure the driver was distracted, but certainly never had any criminal intent and would give anything if that accident hadn't happened.

Second Story: Violence at a Pony League Game - The 13-year-old suspect in this baseball bat murder was found guilty in juvenile court of second-degree murder and was sentenced to confinement in the juvenile detention system until he's 25 (the maximum sentence). Again, probably the right decision. No one won in this matter, but a message had to be sent that no matter how you've been treated, unless your life is in danger you don't get to pick up a bat and beat someone to death with it.

Sadly for the suspect, in addition to spending 12 years in custody, he's probably going to come out of the juvenile system a much worse guy than he was when he went in. That's not a very attractive crowd that he's going to be hanging out with for the next few years.

For some reason this 2nd story generated a bunch of hate comments back to this site, though they have since gone away. I speculated previously that they may have come from over-zealous friends of the suspect, but none of that matters now.

One side note - I didn't realize until I saw the families interviewed on TV following the court hearing that the suspect was black and the victim white. The media stories seemed to ignore those facts altogether, which is the way it should be.

However, given today's racial environment, do you think they would have ignored race as a factor if the races had been reversed? Would there have been hate crime charges as well? Something to think about, but my guess is there would have been a march for civil rights and the suspect would have been vilified as a stone-cold racist had that been the case.