On December 22 a judge sentenced, Anissa Weier, who is currently 16, to 25 years in a mental facility for a crime she committed when she was 12. Anissa, convicted of second degree murder for her role in the stabbing of her classmate, Payton Leutner, will remain imprisoned in the mental institution until she turns 37. Another 12-year-old girl, Morgan Geyser, actually committed the stabbing, but Anissa contributed significantly to its occurrence. Anissa and Morgan said their desire to prove the existence of the fictional YouTube character SlenderMan to the world motivated their actions, a claim that, among other facts, lead a jury to decide mental illness contributed to Anissa’s involvement in the stabbing.
According to The Guardian, the prosecutor in the case urged the judge to hand Anissa the harshest sentence possible stating, “Considering the nature and gravity of this offense, being supervised until the age of 37 is not all that long...in terms of the fact that Payton is looking at a lifetime of scars, physical scars and psychological scarring.”
Was justice served?
That depends on whether “justice” means simple retribution or the prevention of further harm to others in society.
If justice means retribution, then perhaps it was served, for, as the prosecutor noted, the harm inflicted on the victim will continue to affect her for the rest of her life and Anissa’s 25-year sentence could be viewed as an equal, if not a lesser, harm to her conscious experience than that of the victim. The fact she suffers from a mental illness bears just as much weight on her accountability for her actions as the difference in the amount of suffering she will feel during her time in the mental institution and the potential amount she would have felt had she been sent to jail. Her illness played a role, but she still deserves to suffer and to suffer a comparable amount to the suffering she inflicted, factoring in her mental condition.
But if justice is the prevention of further harm, her sentence perfectly and tragically embodies an instance of injustice for the judge explicitly handed Anissa this sentence to cause further harm. The sentence forces her to remain imprisoned in the mental institution for a specific period of time rather than merely the time necessary for doctors to sufficiently treat her mental condition such that she no longer poses a threat to others. The person Anissa becomes after receiving the medial treatment she needs clearly differs from the 12-year-old suffering from an unmitigated mental illness involved in the stabbing and only the latter holds any accountability for the crime. Unfortunate brain chemistry victimized Anissa as much as she victimized Payton. Anissa's future suffering having to cope with her mental illness and the psychological damage inflicted on her from her sickness driven role in the stabbing mirrors Payton’s future suffering dealing with the physical and psychological scars of the event. Justice occurs only when measures to heal them both are taken and further harm to either is avoided.