Juvenile Justice (소년 심판)

Abstract

“I heard that if you’re not 14 yet, you don’t go to prison, even for murder. Is that true? Awesome!” A sentence in a teaser of the series “Juvenile Justice” in which the 13-year-old boy fearlessly speaks to the trial judge and then bursts into laughter that bursts through the courtroom. Such laughter stopped the judge as well as the court official’s dead in their tracks. A boy was charged after the brutal murder of a nine-year-old boy who was his neighbor. After the horrific murder, a boy surrendered himself to the police claiming that he is the murderer using an axe as a weapon without any shock. He also claimed to have schizophrenia. The series has a very intense content and reveals the justice system in the juvenile court. Despite being hypothetical, it resembles the actual event in Thailand, for instance, the event on April 9,2022 where a 14-year-old girl delinquent made a plan for a 16-year-old boy to kill her mother and assault her older brother for preventing them from having a relation. This is disheartening no less than hypothetical events and it leads to the question and criticism from the public why the law still gives protection to juvenile offenders who commit outrageous crimes like adults. There is a vigorous rebuttal to the public to review that in fact “children may not be so pure as a white piece of cloth” as they long used to be compared to by the society in the past. It also inspires the author to think over the current Thai criminal justice system for juveniles which has a specific law and court for criminal cases for juvenile delinquency separately from adult offenders. This article will bring readers to get to know these laws and specific processes and the reasons why the laws have to give protection to juvenile delinquents specifically, how specific processes and measures in replacement of punishment as adult offenders are applied and efficiency of these processes and measures in preventing those juveniles from repeating the same offences.