Young Girls Suspected in Bank Robbery
Bucking the long-standing tradition of teenage girls asking their parents for money when they needed some, a couple of young girls, one age twelve and the other about fourteen or fifteen, decided to “ask” the bank instead. The two girls walked into an Ohio bank earlier this month around 3 p.m., apparently unarmed, and gave the bank teller a note (which may or may not have been written in bubble letters with hearts dotting the letter “i”) demanding money. The bank teller complied and the girls fled the scene with an unidentified amount of money. Thus far, the girls have been able to avoid an extensive search by law enforcement officials.
While the age of the bank robbers is notable from a publicity standpoint, it is also relevant from a criminal law standpoint. In Tennessee, sentences are determined by starting at the presumptive sentence for a given offense and then using mitigating or enhancement factors to increase or decrease the sentence as warranted. One statutory mitigating factor that can be used to decrease a sentence reads thus: “the defendant, because of youth or old age, lacked substantial judgment in committing the offense.”
It should be noted that this mitigating factor has two separate elements. First, the defendant must actually lack substantial judgment in committing the offense. Second, this lack of judgment must be caused by youth or old age. Thus, whether this factor will apply will not be based on a bright-line rule that applies to all defendants but will instead be determined on a case-by-case basis. In the case detailed above, a defense attorney would probably want to attempt to convince the court that the girls did not understand the gravity of the offense they were committing or its possible consequences and instead just thought it would be a fun alternative to school-sanctioned extracurricular activities. Any mitigating factor is worth using if it is at all reasonable and any time very young or elderly defendants are facing criminal charges, this mitigating factor deserves some attention.
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/girls-12-14-suspected-ohio-bank-robbery/story?id=9502425
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