I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learners' featured post. One thing about crimes and those who commit them is that they start small; some of the notorious criminals we see today did not become notorious overnight. If you check their history, you get to see that some of them have records of juvenile crimes, and most of those crimes were treated mildly, thinking they were just kids who still didn't know what they were doing, and then now that little pupa we were all pampering and hiding under the umbrella of being juvenile and not knowing their left from their right has fully matured and is doing way worse than it was doing as a pupa.
No doubt juveniles can be considered not to know their left from their right completely, but trust me, not every crime committed by a juvenile should be judged or looked at from the angle of juvenile justice; some juvenile cases need to be handled with utmost attention, like we are dealing with an adult case. Most cases handled mildly give the juvenile the morale to do worse; trust me, there are juvenile cases that have been overlooked or handled mildly because the person involved is a juvenile, and that juvenile came back to hurt many innocent people, and that could have been avoided if the case had been handled differently or taken more seriously and not taken lightly.
We had a notorious man live in our neighborhood once; his story says that he killed his parents by setting the house on fire because they offended him, but that case was handled mildly, and after a little punishment he was set free and allowed to live amongst us. Living amongst us now, he was no longer a juvenile but now a full-grown man with a wife and son, but strange things keep happening to people who have quarrels with him. If you had a quarrel with him after a day or two, somebody attacked you with a cutlass or a dagger; there were many victims like that, and he was very troublesome, and avoiding him was nearly impossible.
At least two died from attacks like that, and some were critically injured; a man lost his hand because of this same attacker. People started pointing fingers at him, but since there was no evidence and all the attacks happened at night, it was impossible to just pin it on him. Things like that kept happening until he had a quarrel with a neighbor who had a pregnant wife; this psychopath waited until the man was on a business trip and went to the house and attacked the woman. Before neighbors realized what was going on, he ran away but had already stabbed the pregnant woman with a cutlass, and she was bleeding that night.
With her dying breath she called his name, and immediately men mobilized and marched to his house. He claimed to have been sleeping, but his son finally decided to speak up about what his father had been doing that night, and he went to where he hid the cutlass and brought it out for everyone to see, and the cutlass was still dripping with blood. That was how he was apprehended and handed over to the right authorities and properly prosecuted with the testimony of neighbors and mostly that of his son because at some point the wife left him, and it was for this same reason.
So this is a real-life story that happened in my neighborhood about 15 years ago, so there are crimes a juvenile will commit, and handling the case as a juvenile case seems to be the wrong approach. Some juvenile cases need proper attention and handling, like the serious cases they are, and the mental health of the juvenile should be checked before they are allowed back into society.
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