‘Very disturbing’: Florida teens get longer prison sentences than adults
‘Very disturbing’: Florida teens get longer prison sentences than adults
Florida is one of 13 states that give prosecutors unfettered power to try children as adults without getting sign-off from a judge. And when judges determine the penalties for those kids, they give them higher sentences on average for felony crimes than older, adult offenders, according to a Miami Herald investigation.
In May 2018, the judge in Knight’s criminal case ruled that he should be resentenced. But prosecutors asked to put the resentencing on pause roughly six months later, pointing out that other Florida appeals courts had ruled that decades-long sentences were not necessarily equivalent to life and that the Florida Supreme Court was reviewing the cases to resolve the conflict.
The court agreed to the pause. Knight was stuck in limbo for five years. In that time, the state Supreme Court concluded that long sentences such as Knight’s didn’t automatically violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The article says he's currently at Liberty Correctional Facility, but not whether he was brought into the private prison complex.
It is absolutely true that the US criminal justice system is racist and unjust to a certain extent
But surely it shouldn’t be confusing if there is overlap between juveniles who got upgraded to be tried as adults, and juveniles where the circumstances of the case justified an upgraded sentence as opposed to the average person who committed that same crime. This is like confounding factor lesson 101.
Not everybody who is sentenced in our unjust system is automatically therefore a victim of injustice