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Weather: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then mostly sunny with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Saturday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 60s. West winds 5 to 10 mph.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, along South Daytona Avenue, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Notably: A footnote to Monsieur Nicolas, the fabulous memoir by Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne written between 1794–1797, explains his phobia at ending up in Bicêtre, the Evin prison of the day in France, even for children. As translated from the French: “Children aged seven to sixteen, guilty of various offenses and incarcerated at the request of their family or boss, were locked up at the Bicêtre Correctional Facility. In general, they were locked up until they reached the age of majority (twenty-five years). The footnote then quotes from Paul Bru’s 1890 History of Bicêtre (Histoire de Bicêtre, which you can find in the original in the Internet Archive or on Amazon): “Forced to work thirteen hours a day, these young prisoners had no rest except for the few minutes devoted to a meager meal or to singing hymns. At the slightest failure, at the slightest blunder, two guards removed the culprits, tied them by the hands, by the feet, by the middle of the body, to five iron cramps sealed in the wall, and warned the corrector who whipped them with a whip with long leather straps.”
—P.T.
Now this:
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It happened on the same day last week a double-header in Florida’s retrograde adventures in juvenile justice. A prosecutor in Charlotte County decided not to prosecute a 6-year-old boy who kicked his pregnant mother in the stomach. And a 14-year-old boy in Miami expressed remorse to a circuit judge for killing his favorite teacher with a bullet between the eyes.
The mother of 6-year-old Alex Ashley had had him arrested, handcuffed and booked in jail. She wanted him punished. A deputy state attorney said a courtroom is not the place to address a 6-year-old’s immaturity. No such leniency for 14-year-old Nathaniel Brazill. A day after his contortions, a judge sentenced Brazill to 28 years in prison without parole. The final result of the two cases is different. But in both cases a prosecutor replaced parents, judges, juries and biology to decide whether the boy in manacles should go on being a boy — punishable with one eye on rehabilitation and another on leniency — or whether he should be treated as a criminal. No one would dispute that Ashley and Brazill committed acts of depravity. But at what point, exactly, is depravity chalked up to rank immaturity, and at what point is it attributable to the premeditation of a criminal mind that guffaws at notions of childhood and stupidity? In most states, the law doesn’t presume to draw that line. The decision is left to judges, who themselves leave it to all sides involved to argue one way or the other. Not in Florida. Florida law automatically judges youths 16 or older as adults if they commit certain felonies. Florida also gives its prosecutors the power unilaterally to prosecute juveniles 14 and older as adults. The prosecutor doesn’t have to consult with anyone not with a judge, not with defense attorneys, not with counselors or child psychologists. It is a one-person decision, called “prosecutor’s discretion.” Florida prosecutors have had that “discretion” since 1994. The state through the 1990s transferred 7,000 children accused of crimes to adult court each year (the number dropped below 5,000 a year in the last couple of years). That’s how Nathaniel Brazill was declared an adult, and it’s how Lionel Tate before him, the Fort Lauderdale boy who killed a 6-year-old playmate while wrestling with her when he was 12, was declared an adult and convicted to life in prison without parole last March. Transferring a child to adult court at a prosecutor’s discretion essentially allows the law to take sides. It puts young defendants at a disadvantage from the start because the transfer itself is a branding of suspicion. It is as close as the law comes to presuming someone guilty until proved innocent. Not even adult defendants face such presumptions. Treating children as adults sounds tough, but it has nothing to do with deterring crime, let alone rehabilitating young criminals. It does the opposite. Every few years a new study shows how harsher laws against juveniles make for hardened criminals later, not redemptive citizens. The latest such study was released by Florida’s own Department of Corrections this week, showing that 51.3 percent of inmates younger than 18 were arrested again within two years of their release. The overall rate is 34 percent. Why, then, has there been no let-up of Florida’s iron-fisted assault on troubled children? The reigning answer is that get-tough laws are the simple response to a complicated problem no one wants to tackle. It is not all or nothing. Children do commit crimes and they should be punished, but not so barbarically as to graduate them into monsters for the rest of their life. Juvenile justice was first created by an Illinois court only a century ago, but for a very good reason: To ensure that “the care, custody, and discipline of a child shall approximate as nearly as may be that which should be given by its parents,” the court said. Soon after, juvenile courts sprang up all over the country until the retrenchment of the 1990s. With Florida leading the way, juvenile justice is considered old school. Even wimpy. Yet the principle of juvenile justice is just as valid today. It is ironic that Florida considers it outdated, when its alternative creaks with dark-age method and dogma.
–From an Aug. 3, 2001 editorial in the News-Journal.
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
