When in 1988, while shackled, he stabbed a prison guard with a homemade knife. The law and stiff sentences didn’t prevent Bosket from continuing his violence spree behind bars. The law became known as the Willie Bosket law, and New York State was the first state in the nation to pass such draconian legislation aimed at prosecuting violent children. His name was Willie Bosket who, by the time he was 16, had murdered two people and, by his own admission, committed more than 2000 crimes, including armed robberies and stabbings.īosket had been sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum allowable by law for a juvenile offender at the time, for the cold-blooded murder of two men on a New York subway. So long was his criminal history and so heinous his crimes, they led New York State to change its juvenile justice law to allow juveniles as young as 13 to be treated as adults in cases of violent crimes. In 1988, then-New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield was assigned to write an article about a young, black man confined at Woodbourne Correctional Facility north of New York City in Sullivan County.
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