Joshua Phillips Court Case

Fate of Delinquents He’s thirty-three years old, waking up on a cold, hard bed, eating “nutritious” food, scared of the other inmates, knowing his life will end in prison, all for a crime he committed when he was fourteen. He knows that he has a lot longer to serve as he was given a life sentence. This man described, who was once a child delinquent, is like many other children in America who faced the same fate. Since the very first court case of a child murderer, the debate of whether children should be tried as adults has been a raging discussion. Joshua Phillips’ story is one that stands out among many cases of children tried as adults. It was November 3rd, 1998, in Jacksonville, Florida when 14-year-old Phillips was out in his front
Posey was a New Mexico teenager who lived on a ranch with his father, stepmother, and stepsister. He claimed that his father had been extremely abusive for as long as he could remember and, as he got older, the abuse got worse. It was Monday July 4, 2004 as Posey, who was fourteen at the time, woke up around five in the morning to clean out the horse stalls which he had done a million times before. His father came out to investigate the work he had done and then proceeded to slap Cody across the face for not cleaning the stalls fast enough. According to Cody and his defense team, his father then brought him into the house and got out a blowtorch that was used for welding around the ranch and burned him but was not yet through with his punishing. Although random and seemingly unnecessary, the father thought it would be best to force Cody to have sex with his wife. When they walked into his parents bedroom his step-mother was laying on the bed completely naked. Posey told sheriff’s deputies that he refused and ran off the property, making up his mind about his next action, the events of that day pushing him over the