California Boy Comes to Trial in Killing of Neo-Nazi Father RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Both the prosecution and the defense involved in a trial set to start here on Monday basically agree on the following: Before dawn on May 1, 2011, 10-year-old Joseph Hall went to his family's living room armed with a snub-nosed revolver, pointed it at his father's head as he lay sleeping on the couch, and shot and killed him. Julie Platner for The New York Times Two weeks before he was shot to death, Jeff Hall, was involved in a skirmish in Pemberton, N.J., at a conference of the National Socialist Movement. Joseph eating a sandwich after a meeting that Mr. Hall held at his house a day before the killing. From there, the two sides are likely to differ on both the events that preceded the shooting and Joseph's exact motive, elements complicated by his age and the fact that his father, Jeff Hall, was a rabid neo-Nazi. And those facts raise several more philosophical quandaries that, depending on how the judge weighs the answers, may determine the outcome of the trial. Among them: whether virulent racism can amount to parental abuse, whether a child exposed to such hate can understand the difference between right and wrong, and whether someone who grows up in such toxic circumstances can be blamed for wanting a way out. The prosecutor, Michael Soccio, says that the actions of Joseph Hall have little to do with Nazism, but rather with his anger at being punished and spanked by his father at a party the day before the killing and the boy's worries that his father would leave his family. Though he says he sympathizes with Joseph and his upbringing - "There's a sweet side to him," Mr. Soccio said in an interview this month - he also has little doubt that the boy is a killer. "What he did, had it been done by anybody older, there would be no doubt that it was a murder," said Mr. Soccio, the chief deputy district attorney in Riverside County. It's planned. It's premeditated. It was carried out in a cold, killing fashion. It is a murder. But Joseph's public defender, Matthew J. Hardy, says his client has neurological and psychological problems, compounded by exposure to neo-Nazi "conditioning" and physical abuse in the home. "He's been conditioned to violence," Mr. Hardy said, adding, "You have to ask yourself: Did this kid really know that this act was wrong based on all those things?" Instead, Mr. Hardy said, Joseph thought he was being a hero by shooting his father. "He thought what he was doing was right," said Mr. Hardy. And while that may be hard for other people to understand, in his mind, in a child's mind, if he thought it was right, or at least didn't think it was wrong, then he cannot be held responsible. Whether that holds true is up to Judge Jean Leonard of Riverside County Superior Court, who will oversee the murder trial without a jury. What is certain, however, is that if found responsible for the killing and made a ward of the state, Joseph, who is now 12, would be the youngest person held in one of the three fenced-in facilities run by California's Department of Juvenile Justice, which houses about 900 of some of the state's most serious juvenile offenders. The median age of these offenders held by the state is 19, and, if found reasonable for the murder, Joseph would likely be held until he was 23. Joseph Hall's case is also unusual because such acts of violence by children are exceedingly rare. Kathleen M. Heide, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, conducted a study and found only 16 arrests of a child under the age of 11 in the killing a parent between 1976 and 2007, roughly one every two years. Trials in such murders are even rarer, said Robert Weisberg, a co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, saying he could not recall seeing anyone that young on trial for such a crime in California. Children as young as 10, or younger, who are accused of murder present special challenges to courts, said Dr. Heide, because of the longstanding legal belief that children are incapable of formulating the intent to commit the crime and do not understand the magnitude of its consequences. Children that young often do not grasp "that death means forever gone," she said. California's penal code also says that children under 14 cannot be charged with a crime without clear proof that "they knew its wrongfulness."