And while the state will have to pay damages - the police argument has always been that this particular 13 year old was active in gangs and was allegedly chasing someone with a firearm only days before he was swept up in the SOE.
We asked Mendez about that:
Jules Vasquez
"So the criticism will be that he is a bad pikni, and he's out there in the criminal circle of adults. So he has to be penalized along with the adults."
Leslie Mendez, Attorney - Mother of 13 Year Old
"The allegation is that he's, that he's a bad boy."
Jules Vasquez
"The allegation is that he's a bad bwai. And so if you want play bad bwai, you're going to deal with the bad man they."
Leslie Mendez, Attorney - Mother of 13 Year Old
"I understand that as an instinctual and emotional response or an evaluation of a situation. But the legal principles that have been developed, have been developed to ensure that we're not only acting on our emotional evaluation of Crime and of tensions in society. And what the law says, is that children, for a myriad of reasons, have to be treated differently from adults. That's not to say that they are immune to consequence. No, the meaning of that did that when we treat with them, we treat them with, a concern for repair, concern for rehabilitation and a concern for prevention."
"You take the child, being, in a state of development. And so you appreciate the level of culpability as well as the possibility, the high possibility for rehabilitation. And there there's studies, and there's studies that have been done, and scholarship that show that confinement, in fact, has the opposite has a counter counterproductive, is a counterproductive measure when you are seeking to treat and deal with children that are in conflict with the law."
