Slain White Supremacist's Son Ordered Held in Juvenile Detention Facility
The young boy who killed his abusive neo-Nazi father four years ago as the man slept on a couch will remain locked up in a juvenile detention facility, a California appellate court ruled.
On appeal, defense lawyers argued that the judge made a mistake when the court allowed the boy to be evaluated by a doctor without his attorney being present, according to the Associated Press. The defense also claimed the judge wrongly considered statements the child made to authorities in violation of his Miranda rights.
But on Monday, a division of the 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that the judge did not commit errors and had properly sentenced the child to the juvenile detention facility for at least seven years, adding, according to the AP, that the timing of the rights advisement was “deemed harmless.”
In the pre-dawn darkness of May 1, 201, the boy, then 10, shot and killed his father, Jeff Hall, 32, a West Cost leader of one of the country’s largest neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement (NSM). The fact that the boy crept up to the couch where his father lay sleeping in the family’s living room in Riverside, Calif., and shot him in the head at point blank range with a .357 magnum was never in dispute. The question was why.
Defense lawyers said Hall had physically and psychologically abused his young son for years.
But two years after the shooting, a judge ruled that despite’s the boy’s “exceptional needs,” he was responsible for his father’s death and committed him to at least seven years in a California juvenile justice facility, where one of his defense lawyers said he would be “surrounded” by “gang members and other kids who have committed sexual offenses.”
At the time, the boy’s lawyers argued that he should be placed in a secure residential facility where he could receive better mental health services. Punam Grewal, one of child’s lawyers, blasted the sentence as “miscarriage of justice.”
“There was a complete disregard of the evidence of this child’s disabilities, complete disregard of the evidence of the horrific 10 years of abuse the he suffered,” Grewal told the Los Angeles Times.
The boy can be held in the juvenile facility until he is 23.
