Richmond will be held in juvenile detention for at least a year, and perhaps until he is twenty-one; his codefendant, Trent Mays, who is seventeen, will serve an extra year on a charge of distributing child pornography, for taking and sending around a picture of the victim, naked. Poppy Harlow’s exchange with Candy Crowley focused almost entirely on how “two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.” Harlow mentioned that the charges were serious and that the victim was young, but talked about the prosecution as a sort of injustice against her, too: “The last thing she wanted to do was sit on that stand and testify. A more relevant question was posed by Amy Davidson at the New Yorker: “Where is the challenge to the idea that their lives really are ‘over’? Does it destroy a teen-ager’s life to take him off the path of being an adult rapist?” 
 
 Henry Rollins came out of the woodwork to muse about the efficacy and values of the criminal justice system: “I wondered if the years in the facility will ‘help’ them.
– When the Steubenville verdict came in, one of the two convicted teens said in the courtroom that his life was over, notes the New Yorker. Many of his critics would agree, using the conventional wisdom that sex offenders can't be rehabilitated. But at Salon, Irin Carmon makes the case that conventional wisdom is wrong in this instance: "Juvenile sex offenders often can and do get better," she writes. Carmon talks to medical experts on the subject and finds that consensus has shifted dramatically. "We've done a complete about-face," says one at Johns Hopkins. Hold teens accountable, of course, but also acknowledge that their brains, specifically their ability to suss out the long-term consequences of their actions, haven't fully developed. This matters, writes Carmon, "because the main reason researchers argue that juveniles found guilty of sex crimes don’t belong on the sex offender list is the copious evidence that they’re susceptible to treatment—and are unlikely to reoffend." It also raises the hope that if rehabilitation after a crime is possible, so is better prevention in the first place. Click for the full column.