Ericka DiMeglio

Professors Dziech and Bourke

2 March 2017
ENGL 2002 005
Response 7 - Lost for Life

How do we decide the type of sentences that children who commit murder should

receive? Obviously we, as citizens of the general population, do not make these decisions

directly unless we are selected for jury duty, but we still have an input as to the views of

the officials that we elect to make these decisions for us. Thus, it is important to consider

how we, as individuals, feel about kids who kill. However, this is not an easy subject to

think about and there are no clear answers to many of our questions. On one hand, a life

was taken and justice for the victim should be served, but, on the other, the child was

likely at the mercy of mitigating factors, like parental abuse or neurological

abnormalities. Documentaries like Lost for Life attempt to provide insight into the lives

of real child killers and the factors that may have been at play in their crimes. However,

just like any form of media, it is important to be cognizant of the biases that may be

present and the extent to which a film like this may attempt to sway their audience to

their way of thinking.

Prior to watching Lost for Life, my opinion was that courts should take mitigating

factors into account while also ensuring the safety of the community. Kids should not be

held to the same standards as adults because it is widely known that their brains are not

fully developed; yet care should be taken to ensure that dangerous individuals with the

potential to recidivate are not released. This is definitely a hard balance for courts to

achieve, but I do not believe that kids should be subjected to mandatory life sentences

without the possibility of parole. I believe that every effort should be made to rehabilitate
every child, but if a certain juvenile offender is unable to be reformed, they need to be

kept off the streets, even if that means they are in prison for life.

Lost for Life is a documentary that focuses mainly on the juvenile offenders and

thus attempts to sway viewers into believing that mitigating factors need to be considered

in child killer cases. The documentary appeals to its viewers emotions by focusing on the

hardships placed on families of convicted juvenile murderers. It shows several scenes

from emotional support groups in which family members of juvenile lifers lament the

pain they feel at the idea that their loved one will never escape the confines of prison. It

also shows interviews with the parents of convicted murderer, Brian, in which they

express that they not only wish they could have helped their son, but that they possess

sympathy for the family of Brians 16 year old victim, Cassie. The plight of the families

of convicts is unique in that they feel both pain at the loss of their family member and

regret for the act that they have committed. The documentary briefly shows scenes

focused on the family of three victims of this type of crime, but they do not go into the

emotional detail or depth that the offenders family interviews do. While crime scene

photos of Cassies body are briefly shown, this is only done in the context of Brians

struggles with remembering his crime. This combination of emotional appeals focused

only on the juvenile offenders allows the audience to form greater sympathy for the

murderers and, in some ways, lessens our natural sympathy for their victims families.

Lost for Life also contains several intellectual appeals focused, again, on the

offenders. A significant portion of the documentary is focused on the abuse that two of

the murderers, Jacob and Josiah, experienced. Jacobs parents, whom he murdered, are

cast as physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive. Jacobs classmates mother is

interviewed and paints the picture that Jacob is not at fault for these crimes, but that the

community is due to the lack of assistance they provided him. While this connection is

not expressly made with Josiah, a significant portion of the documentary is dedicated to

his sisters stories of the abuse they both experienced as members of a religious cult.

Nearly all of the murderers seem to express that they were different people when they

committed their crimes and that, logically, they should not have to pay for the sins of

someone else or those that they were abused into committing.

Overall, this documentary made me more sympathetic to the offenders and

lessened my sympathy for the victims in some aspects. Since I already felt that

rehabilitation should be key, it did not alter my perspective on this point, but I feel that it

may have if I held a different opinion. While I believe that this documentary presents

important mitigating factors for some of these offenders, such as prior abuse, it does not

present the whole story. The victims were largely left out of this film and when they were

presented it was in an unsympathetic way. In order to get the whole picture required to

make a good decision about the fates of these offenders, the victims need to be

considered as well. While the offenders express their desire to move on with their lives,

we need to look beyond this film to remember that their victims cannot.