Too young to drive, but old enough for life in prison

---

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (AFP): More than 70 inmates in US prisons were 13 or 14 years old when they committed their crimes-too young to drive or watch a scary movie but old enough to spend the rest of their lives in jail, according to a report.
This situation does not exist anywhere else in the world, according to the report by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative.
Over the course of a year lawyers with the group, which specialises in defending the poorest citizens, pored over legal files across the country to uncover the number of young teens tried and convicted as adults.
At least 2,225 juveniles aged 17 or younger have been sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, a punishment forbidden by the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which the United States has not ratified.
Among those juveniles, 73 were under the age of 15 when they committed the crime. Half of them are African-American, hardly representative of a society where 12 per cent of the population is black.
The teens have all been incarcerated with adults, where they face the same risk of beatings, rape and abuse as their elders. Some have attempted suicide.
"This is an unintended and disastrous consequence of prosecuting children as adults: children too young to drive, or even see a scary movie by themselves, are being sentenced to die in adult prisons," said EJI director Bryan Stevenson.
Most often the juveniles participated in crimes in which an adult was killed. Considered therefore as guilty as an adult, they were sent to prison based on mandatory guidelines that in some states judges cannot change.