In a case that's drawing a lot of attention based on the insane level of leniency shown, two 14-year-olds who bullied, murdered, danced on the body of, and filmed a helpless 13-year-old, have been let off with the mother-of-all-slaps-on-the-wrist by a Riverside County Superior Court Justice. 

According to local radio station KTLA:

Two 14-year-old Southern California boys who beat a fellow student in 2019, causing his death, won’t go to jail but must undergo anger management therapy, a judge ruled.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge Roger A. Luebs imposed the therapy as a probation condition before releasing the teenagers to their parents on Thursday, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported Friday.

On Sept. 16, 2019, the teenagers were videotaped attacking 13-year-old Diego Stolz outside classrooms at Landmark Middle School in Moreno Valley, east of Los Angeles. One boy struck the teenager in the head from behind and he fell, hitting his head against a pillar. The boys then continued punching the boy, who died nine days later from a brain injury.

Last fall, the boys entered the equivalent of guilty pleas in juvenile court last fall to involuntary manslaughter and assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury. They spent 47 days in juvenile custody.

The helpless 13-year-old orphan had been bullied, brutalized, begged for help from the teachers' unionized school officials whose fat-salaried job was to protect him, and got nothing. They let him get murdered. And early on, they callously blamed the kid's family for his killing, instead of themselves. The case makes one's blood boil.

How can a 13-year-old's life be worth absolutely nothing? The kid was an orphan, living with his aunt and uncle, who are now suing the school district for its lazy indifference. They'll get money no doubt, but the kid still lies dead, robbed of absolutely everything as the killers snigger in remorselessness, a fact noted by the judge in this KTLA passage:

At their sentencing, the judge said psychological reports described the boys as lacking empathy and said they blamed the victim for the attack.

All the same, as City News Service reported, the judge ignored Department of Probation recommendations to throw the book at this pair (and like Jimmy Carter with the Iranian hostage-takers) he said he really didn't think they meant to kill the kid despite their slamming him into a wall, dancing on his head, and videoing their vileness for all their creepy little friends to see.

Parts of his sentencing were obnoxious, too:

Luebs directed that each offender enroll in character development and anger management classes, as well as perform 150 hours community service, not play violent video games, avoid social media and write letters of apology to the Stolz family. They were additionally ordered to permanently steer clear of one another.

Luebs warned the pair that any probation violation could land them in deep trouble, possibly resulting in time behind bars.

Why, exactly, are they getting 'one last warning' to behave themselves, when they've already done the worst they could possibly do?  These killers should have had their one-last-warning before they moved up to killing people. This didn't happen out of the blue -- one of these plagues-on-society was already on probation when he tried his hand at killing. How seriously are they going to take this latest 'one-last-warning'? The message they've gotten so far is that if they get caught violating probation, all they will get is another one-last-warning. But remember, one more chance.

In the past, killers of this stripe went to juvenile detention up until the age of 26. A few went to real jails with the adults, given the callous nature of their crimes and their demonstrated incorrigibility.

These killers get anger management "therapy," character building courses (what, Upward Bound-style romping on rocks in a Kidz Kamp vacay?), and 150 hours of community service (where they are likely to be a plague again meaning they will get signed off without the hours by the community groups just to get them away from them). No video games, no contact with each other, no cell phones (which they used to plan the killing) and merely 'avoiding' social media, all of which are going to be impossible for authorities to monitor. As for apologies to the family, ugh. Forced apologies are phony and insulting, and rest assured, theirs will have something insulting in it. 

What these killers need is actual punishment, not free social services. They got those earlier and look what happened.

The aunt and uncle of the murdered orphan, who pleaded and pleaded with authorities to help him, leaving a trail of evidence of it, are rightly suing the school district for its pattern of indifference to the plight of the kid, who had no choice but to be in that stinking school, like it or not. Yes, they have a case, and if I were on that jury, I'd give them everything they asked for.

The broader problem is that this is criminal justice "reform" in action -- coddling and protecting the killers, and ignoring the victims of murder who can't, after all, vote, lobby, or go to the press -- kind of like unborn babies now. For a helpless orphan, what chance at all did he have against such  killers?

Yes, the judge bears some blame for ignoring probation department recommendations and handing out this slap on the wrist. Why he did it is very hard to parse.

Was he a crazy leftist who takes money from Soros? Apparently not. His record shows him to be an apparently moderate Democrat or moderate Republican, donating money to the likes of then-moderate Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republicans Rep. Ken Calvert and now-former Sen. John F. Seymour during his money-donating days in the 1990s as an attorney. He was appointed judge by then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, who is a decent man, not a crazy, and quite moderate compared to the lunacy out there now. He's located in the Inland Empire, which is historically one of the more conservative parts of California. He's run unopposed in recent elections according to Ballotpedia and not answered questions about his political views on the same forum. I looked for controversial rulings from him and didn't find any thus far. It's hard to say what happened, but the judge did note that his decision was going to be unpopular. According to KTLA:

“I know that my decision will not make everyone happy. In fact, it will probably make some people in the community angry,” the judge said.

“I’m sorry there isn’t more I could do to address your loss,” he told members of Stolz’s family.

No kidding. But the judge isn't the main problem here.

A much bigger and better-defined culprit is one-party all-blue legislative California, which did indeed pass some terrible "criminal justice reforms" to effecively nullify all punishment for under-18 killers of orphans. One law, possibly the one cited by the judge, appears to be here, mandating 'least restrictive environment' all to give the felonious youngsters more of a normal childhood, you see, as if that was going to happen given how they responded to such an environment before they went out killing people.

The other thing is, these "reforms" have literally emptied out California's juvenile detention centers.

Here's a list of measures from ten years ago from one of the Soros-style criminal justice reform outfits:

State Drastically Reduces Youth Prison Population

Over the past several years, litigation and concern about dangerous conditions in California youth prisons resulted in media attention, stakeholder education about the problematic conditions, advocacy by a broad spectrum of organizations, and increased costs to the state for the confinement of youth. These developments have led to higher numbers of youth being treated by community-based programs in some counties, legislation restricting the types of offenses that can lead to state imprisonment, and budget realignment that redirects funds from state juvenile justice to the counties. These practice and policy changes—along with an unfortunate increase in direct files to adult court—have contributed to a dramatic drop in the population sent to California’s state youth facilities over the past fifteen years. On February 22, 2010, the California Division of Juvenile Justice closed the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, the state’s largest juvenile prison. The state now has only three youth prisons, down from 11 in 2003. The overall population of California’s youth prisons has declined from a staggering 9,572 in 1996 to 1,082 at the end of 2011, an 89 percent decrease.

In San Diego County alone, which abuts Riverside County, pretty much nobody juvenile goes to jail anymore, no matter how many classmates they kill. Here's a left-slanted 2018 report touting the empty jails in the local Voice of San Diego:

San Diego County’s four detention facilities can hold 855 young people. But on a recent Wednesday, just 311 youths were housed inside the county’s prisons and camps, said Chief Probation Officer Adolfo Gonzales. At least five to six wings of the county’s juvenile detention space are totally empty at present, he said. Just eight years ago, the number of incarcerated kids was three times as high: The average daily population in lockup stood at 1,008 for January 2010.

The report has a doozy of a graph showing plummeting juvenile detention numbers in multiple California counties, including Riverside. Apparently, nobody goes to jail, no matter what they do and word has gotten out in the thug-American community that the killins' are easy now.

It goes to show that so-called criminal justice reform is a total fraud. Nobody gets punished. And for helpless, 13-year-old orphans like Diego Stolz, nobody gets justice. This is vile, and cries out for reform. The little kid got zero justice. His life was essentially declared worthless by the leftists in power in California. One can only hope that this finally is what it takes to wake up California's voters and make this 'criminal reform' legislation an issue. The only people who benefit here are actual criminals.

Image: Screen shot, YouTube