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January 2, 2014

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Dear Mr. Cox, ! My name is Molly Skeffington and I am a student at South Portland high school. In my English class we are doing unit on justice, and creating a project on if we think justice was served in whatever topic we chose. Now, I'll bet you're thinking what this has to do with you, right? The answer is quite simple, your definition of justice is much different than mine and even different from the legal definition, which you, as a judge, should be following. ! If you're wondering what injustice I am talking about, it is the Charlie Howard case. This was the case where three young men ages 15, 16 and 17 murdered Charlie Howard because he was gay. The three young men were minors at the time. According to the law, authorities have to look into a minors home life and history to see if the minors could be mentally troubled. Looking into the minors background is a step that has to be done because life sentencing without parole is illegal for minors. Having said that on average the punishment for a minor that has committed murder is 10-12 years. This killing was motivated by bias towards Charie's sexual orientation which classifies this as a hate crime. Hate crimes are more serious crimes because they target people on a larger scale, they are not just a random robbery. So, the punishment for a hate crime is more extreme than a regular crime, especially when it comes to murder. But apparently this fact didn't occur to you when you sentenced these 3 young men to jail time not to exceed their 21st birthday. Which it didn't because their jail time was just about to years. I think this is way to little of a punishment considering this is a murder hate crime and the punishment should be harsher than a murder that is not

caused by bias. An average of 10 years for a regular murder to two years for hate crime murder is way to different and is injustice. ! When you ruled that the young mens punishments should not exceed their 21st birthday, you didn't just hurt Charlie's family, you hurt the whole lgbtq community. The lgbtq community is the larger group of people I was talking about earlier that are effected by hate crimes. This ruling is looked on as a loss for them and a win for people who have a drive to commit these hate crimes. So, maybe without even realizing it, your ruling of injustice gave hate criminals more power because now they can think, "Well if they got out with minimal punishment, why can't I?" ! I understand that this crime happened 30 years ago, but that doesn't make the injustice any less great. I'm definitely not the only one who feels this way considering Charlie Howard's case was mentioned in the Stephan King novel It, and Charlie's story inspired the poet Mark Doty to write a poem entitled "Charles Howard' Decent" Charlie's memory is one that should be cherished and one way to do this is to bring his killers to justice, unfortunately because of your decision, that isn't possible. I have one last question for you, if Charlie was your son, do you think your ruling would have been any different? Sincerely, Molly Skeffington