About a month before two young boys were charged with the murder of 11-year-old Ryan Harris, Chicago police and prosecutors investigated the death of another child and found themselves with two young suspects.
Two half-brothers, ages 9 and 10, allegedly admitted to police that they had kicked, beaten and sodomized 15-month-old Dante Waters, leaving him with bruises over most of his body. But unlike the Ryan Harris case, which resulted in charges against boys ages 7 and 8, neither of these boys was charged.
How two cases could be handled so differently–despite admissions from the suspects– raises questions about how decisions are made to file charges when young children are involved. In these cases, police have an even greater responsibility because, generally, prosecutors aren’t involved, and the question of intent takes on added significance because of the age of the suspects.
To sustain a guilty verdict on a charge of murder, prosecutors must prove that a defendant knew that his actions could cause death or serious injury. In some cases, intent is more easily shown–for example, pulling the trigger of a gun can be sufficient–but proving a child knew a kick or repeated blows could kill is more difficult.
Police had no problem determining that the extremely young suspects in the Ryan Harris case could form the intent to commit murder. Yet, in the Dante Waters case, police felt differently, even though the suspects were older.
“The siblings weren’t charged because of their age and lack of intent,” said Harrison Area Violent Crimes Lt. John Farrell. “How could a kid at that age have any intent?
“They weren’t trying to hurt the baby,” he said. “They struck the baby to stop the baby from crying.”
Besides intent, the cases differ in the role played by prosecutors. The state’s attorney’s office wasn’t consulted in the Ryan Harris case; juvenile cases aren’t subjected to felony review. But in the Waters case, because an adult became a suspect at one point, a prosecutor became involved.
In cases that involve adults, police are prohibited from filing felony charges without seeking approval from prosecutors, who are at police stations and who usually take part in questioning suspects and taking confessions.
The system, called felony review, has been part of the justice system in Cook County for more than a decade. Its main purpose is to serve as a legal check to reduce the number of unprovable or weak cases from reaching already clogged court dockets by, at the earliest stage, consulting prosecutors, who likely have a better view as to whether a case is winnable.
Without a system of felony review for juvenile cases, and because police reports are often still being typed and therefore unavailable when the cases first come to court, prosecutors must rely heavily on what police tell them in determining whether to pursue a case.
As a result, many juvenile cases wind up being dropped as the cases wend their way through the system–the Legislative Committee on Juvenile Justice in a May 1996 report said that 75 percent of all juvenile criminal cases do not result in guilty findings.
Although many cases are resolved agreeably without a guilty finding and others result in children being placed on supervision, many others are dismissed by prosecutors on the verge of trial.
Following the criticism raised in the Ryan Harris case because prosecutors didn’t screen the charges, Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine has said his prosecutors will get involved if police ask. Critics have long said the police lack the expertise to question juveniles without suggesting answers or coercing confessions.
The Ryan Harris case has captured the attention of the public, largely because of the suspects’ ages and also because defense attorneys and others have harshly criticized the notion that the boys could have had an intent to kill.
The case is, according to police, based largely on the statements of the two boys, particularly the 7-year-old. Wentworth Area homicide detectives said the 7-year-old admitted knocking the 11-year-old girl down with a rock he threw on July 27 as she rode through the Englewood neighborhood.
Then, he allegedly told them, he and his friend dragged her into the weeds, where they removed her underwear, put her underpants in her mouth and began rubbing her body “very softly” with leaves.
On Friday, the case is scheduled to return to court, where a number of motions are to be heard, including one filed by the prosecutors seeking competency examinations of the two boys.
Dante Waters’ murder occurred behind closed doors, and has received little public attention or scrutiny. The 15-month-old boy had been left home on July 5 with five other children under the supervision of the oldest, a 10-year-old. The family–a mother and six children–was poor and had to sleep in one bed.
The investigation of Dante’s death began when the mother, 28-year-old Madonna Thompson, returned to her apartment in the 2500 block of West Jackson Boulevard. She discovered Dante lifeless in the bed, according to welfare agency reports.
In a petition filed in Juvenile Court after Dante’s death, prosecutors said the two boys admitted to sexually abusing Dante, “as well as kicking . . . and inflicting other injuries.” The older boy has since turned 11 and the 9-year-old’s birthday is in October.
Dante, who weighed 22 pounds and was 31 inches tall, suffered a lacerated liver and adrenal gland, according to an autopsy.
Prosecutors became involved in the case because police initially focused their investigation on Thompson, the boys’ mother.
Bob Benjamin, a spokesman for Devine, said the mother, when first questioned by police, said she was asleep when Dante was killed. Later, after further questioning, she said that she was not in their West Side apartment that night but had gone out on the evening of July 5 and returned home at 2 a.m. to find Dante was dead.
The two boys, on the other hand, told police what happened from the first moment they were questioned, Benjamin said. As a result, prosecutors approved filing a felony charge of child endangerment against Dante’s mother and decided that charging the boys was not appropriate. Benjamin said that the mother’s action in putting a 10-year-old in charge of the other children was critical in determining how to handle the case.
Catherine Ryan, head of the state’s attorney’s juvenile justice bureau, said the decision not to charge the boys was appropriate because “she was the adult and we felt was responsible for the behavior in this case.”
Instead of filing criminal charges, prosecutors filed petitions in Juvenile Court seeking to take custody of the two boys and Thompson’s three other children. Both boys will be screened for entry into therapy programs for sexually aggressive children.
Also contributing to the decision not to press charges against the boys, according to Benjamin, was that prosecutors did not think they could prove the 10-year-old boy intended to kill Dante. And, he said, prosecutors were not sure they could prove that the 9-year-old’s actions led directly to Dante’s death.
“The 10-year-old, we felt, had been put in a very difficult situation,” said Benjamin. “It’s a question of provability.”
