Unequal Press Coverage of Justice

In 2001, Lionel Tate was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing a six-year-old girl. At the time of the death, Tate was twelve years old. Tate's defense at trial was that he was emulating wrestling moves he saw on television, and killed her accidentally. The prosecutors presented a compelling case that, given the nature and extent of the girl's injuries, the death resulted from a very serious beating and not as the defense claimed. But nobody involved with the case disputed that Tate was developmentally slow, nor that the disputed that life without parole was an unreasonably harsh penalty - even the prosecutors advocated a lower sentence, but "life without parole" was the only setencing option under Florida law. (While Governor Jeb Bush made some sympathetic noises suggesting that he felt it was inappropriate to apply such sentences to children and very young teens, he apparently lacks the backbone to translate those sentiments into action.)

Now, almost three years after his sentencing, Tate's conviction has been reversed. The reversal was described with an unusal association by Newsweek:

Almost three years after he became the youngest person sentenced to life in prison (at 14), Lionel Tate won a new trial last week. A Florida appeals court ruled that his mental competency should have been evaluated before his 2001 trial for stomping a 6-year-old to death. There were plenty of signs that he didn't comprehend his situation: doctors deemed him developmentally slow, he spent parts of the trial doodling obliviously and he rejected a generous three-year plea deal. Along with two other Florida cases--involving Nathaniel Brazill, who's serving 28 years for shooting his teacher to death at 13, and Alex and Derek King, who are serving seven and eight years, respectively, for bludgeoning their father to death when they were 12 and 13--Tate has focused a national spotlight on the state's treatment of juvenile offenders. Florida leads the nation in trying children as adults and is one of 15 states that empower prosecutors rather than judges to do so.

While the heavy news coverage of the trial of the King brothers inspired, in me, immediate thoughts of the Tate case, despite the similarities of the case - poor children in Florida, charged with first degree murder arising out of the beating death of the victim - I don't recall that the media has often drawn parallels between the case.

What I found interesting about the coverage of the King brothers case, as compared to the coverage of the trial of similarly aged children as adults with potential for life sentences without the possibility of parole, was how sympathetic the public, press, and pundits seemed. Whereas in cases like that of Lionel Tate, or Michigan's trial of Nathaniel Abraham as an "adult" for a murder he committed at age eleven, the difference in treatment seemed to arise from the fact that Tate and Abraham were African American, while the King brothers were photogenic white kids. (Do you disagree? Please share your thoughts in the comments section about what I am missing.)

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