So picture the scene. It’s morning in a small town in western Pennsylvania. A woman lies asleep in her bed. She’s eight months pregnant. Her seven and four year old daughters are also in the house, as is her 11 year old stepson. The two older children leave for school. A short time later, the four year old girl approaches some men who are cutting trees near the property. She tells the men that she thinks her mommy is dead.

Kenzie Marie Houk was 26 years old when she died, shot in the head while she slept. Investigators at the scene took only a few hours to decide on a suspect for the killing. Jordan Brown was questioned, arrested, charged and will soon be committed for trial in the State court in Pittsburgh. If found guilty, Brown will spend the rest of his life in prison - the mandatory sentence for murder in this American state.

Sounds cut and dried doesn’t it? You do the crime, you do the time. Except this case has an unusual aspect, one which has led for calls for Jason Brown not to be tried like other people accused of murder. The reason? Jason Brown is 13 years old. At the time of the killing he was 11.

Kenzie Marie Houk was his step mother. Prosecutors claim he snuck into her bedroom before he left for school that morning and shot her through the head with a gun his father bought him for target practice. The gun was a model made specifically for children. Under state law, it does not require to be registered.

The case of Jason Brown has divided opinion. To one side are gathered the hard liners, represented most vocally by the family of the dead woman and in particular Houk’s mother. A website has been set up, describing the killing from the point of view of Kenzie Marie and her dead, unborn child. This faction supports the idea that Brown should be tried in an adult court and receive an adult sentence if found guilty. They argue that the boy knew right from wrong, that he understood he was committing an act of murder. They point out that in Pennsylvania, there is no minimum age below which a child cannot be tried as an adult. Altogether, 22 States have no minimum age for criminal responsibility. In the 28 which do, the specified age ranges from 7 in Oklahoma to 15 in New Mexico.

It’s that inconsistency which the other side uses as a counter argument. How can a child of 7 be considered an adult in one part of America and not in another? Conversely, does a 15 year old lose the ability to tell right from wrong if he or she moves house from New Mexico to Idaho? This side argues that there is no consensus on the question of when a child becomes an adult for the purposes of criminal responsibility. This side argues that Jason Brown should considered a child and be tried in a juvenile court. An application was made by Brown’s defense team to that effect. It was turned down by the Lawrence County Court. The application will shortly go to appeal.

This is an issue we’ve faced in Britain, most traumatically over the trial of the two boys accused of killing James Bulger. In the UK, the age of criminal responsibility is 10. The two boys were tried as adults, but the judge who presided over the case sentenced them to eight years imprisonment. The then- Home Secretary Michael Howard’s attempt to increase this to 15 years was overturned by the House of Lords. The two boys were released in 2001. One of them is once again behind bars, after being found guilty of possessing child pornography. This time he was tried and sentenced as an adult.

So which side is right? Can we set an age at which we can confidently say we know a child knows the difference between right and wrong? Even if we can, is this is the same as understanding the consequences of our actions? How do we decide?

There’s little research to help. The founding father of child developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, had much to say about how a child’s sense of morals grow and matures, but less to say about at what age we can fix the different stages. Children differ widely in how fast they grow, how quickly they master certain basic skills like language and number, how soon they are ready for each step into the adult world. It’s not a surprise that acquiring a full appreciation of the finality of death varies just as much. Perhaps an intelligent 7 year old Oklahoman would get to that point sooner than a not-so-bright kid from New Mexico. Who knows?

We don’t know. So perhaps the best way to decide is to look at how we behave when it comes to children and responsibility. We don’t let children drive cars. We don’t let them operate heavy machinery. We don’t leave them unsupervised for long periods. If we have a particle of common sense, we don’t give them access to loaded weapons.  We behave in this way because we are aware that children do not have the judgment or the foresight to handle such responsibility well. Yet when a child is given that responsibility (a loaded gun) some of us expect that child to behave like an adult and receive an adult-size portion of the consequences.

I’m going to give the last word to a woman who is in a position to understand exactly how the family of Kenzie Marie Houk feels.

Beate Raedergard
Mother whose child was killed by young boys

“My five-year-old daughter, Silje, was killed by two boys near our home in Trondheim, Norway. It was a year after the killing of James Bulger, and the two incidents were compared in the press. In Norway, where the age of criminality is 15, the boys were treated differently. Silje was stripped, stoned and beaten, and left for dead. I do not understand why and I will never recover, but I don't hate the boys. I think they understood what they had done, but not the consequences. The boys went back to school, were helped by psychologists and have had to learn how to treat others to fit back into society.”