This is a true crime list about 10 children who committed murders.
DISCLAIMER AND WARNING: Some of the contents are graphic and very disturbing, especially because many of the victims were children themselves. Reader discretion is advised.
11/24/20...
The case of Maddie Clifton's murder at the hands of young Joshua Phillips in Jacksonville, Florida, made a lot of news in the late '90s, not only because of its gruesomeness and Phillips's obvious guilt, but also because the sentence is still controversial under the American constitutional point of view.
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8-year-old Maddie Clifton disappeared on November 8, 1998. She failed to return home for dinner after spending an evening out to play. Her mother Sheila reported her missing to 911 and that night the family and the neighbours searched for her with flashlights.
Police and hundreds of volunteers kept looking for Maddie over the next 7 days. A big reward was offered, flyers were distributed around town, even the FBI became involved... until Melissa Phillips, a neighbour of the Clifton family, made a terrible discovery.
On the morning of the seventh day after Maddie's disappearance, she went to her 14-year-old son Joshua's bedroom to clean up. She noticed some water leaking on the floor at the end of the waterbed, accompanied by a strange smell. She pulled apart the baseboard to check under the bed and saw a human foot. She immediately ran outside to call a police officer and led him to Joshua's bedroom.
Maddie Clifton's rotting body had been hidden inside the pedestal of Joshua Phillips's waterbed the whole time. She was beaten over the head and stabbed at least nine times in the chest and twice in the neck, undressed from the waist down.
The boy was arrested at his school and when was questioned by police, he confessed to the murder.
According to him, Maddie, who not only was his neighbour, but also his friend and playmate, came over to his house on the early evening of the day she disappeared, asking him to play baseball together. She was a tomboy and loved playing that game. At first, Joshua said no, because his father would be getting home soon and would be angry if she was there, but he later agreed. The two of them played together in his backyard, until a ball that Joshua hit with his baseball bat hit hard Maddie on her head. Since the girl started to scream in pain, Joshua panicked and carried her to his bedroom. Maddie's moaning and screams became so loud that he started to hit her on the head with his baseball bat and stab her in the throat with a pocketknife numerous times in order to silence her. Then he finally proceeded to shove her, still alive, under his bed and went to wash up.
He claimed that he panicked because scared of getting in trouble, that his father, Steve Phillips, who severely forbade anyone in their house when he and his wife were absent, would have punished him. As a psychologist hired by the family attorney confirmed, Joshua was terrified of his father. He said that if he did something wrong "[his father] always had kind of short temper", that he "sometimes never knew what he'd do".
Joshua was taken into custody and his trial began on July 1999. It had to be moved from Jacksonville to Bartow, Florida, because of its intense news coverage. It only lasted 2 days because Joshua's lawyer, Richard Nichols, presented no witnesses or evidence. The entire defence was a closing argument. The only defence he could argue was that the murder wasn't premeditated, his family members talked about how he was a good boy who has never shown a hint of violence before (the Cliftons and his teachers have had the same impression) and how sorry he was for killing Maddie, for which he still has no explanation. "Maybe I should get some kind of counselling or something to find out what's wrong with me" he later said during an interview.
The testimony of a neurologist finding that Joshua had "bilateral frontal lobe lesions", which can impair judgment as well as cause panic, wasn't allowed by the judge as evidence to be presented to court. This theory was also shared by Joshua's mother.
On the other hand, the prosecutor Harry Shorstein suggested that the murder may have been sexually motivated, as Joshua had previously talked to Maddie about sex and that was looking at violent pornographic websites in the half hour preceding the murder, which could have trigged his violence. This would also explain why Maddie's body was nude from her waist down (although autopsy found no evidence of sexual assault), but neither this evidence was admitted to the trial.
In his closing argument, the defence attorney Nichols urged jurors to convict Joshua of manslaughter and filed a motion to sentence him as juvenile. After deliberating for 2 hours, the jury convicted Joshua of first-degree murder and Judge Charles Arnold sentenced him to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Joshua's life in prison is going well, in spite of his remorse for his terrible actions. He graduated with a paralegal degree in 2007 and now works as a law clerk advising fellow inmates. "I don't know if I deserve a second chance or not" he said, "but I know I want the chance".
His no-parole life sentence was later up to discussion, as in 2012 the US Supreme Court ruled that sentencing juveniles to mandatory life without parole is unconstitutional. As a result of retroactive application of this ruling, in September 2016, Joshua's attorney appealed to the court and he was granted a new sentencing hearing in August 2017.
The sentence arrived on November 17th, 2017, which resulted in Judge Waddell Wallace warranting life in prison for Joshua. "I believe this is one of the most rare and unusual crimes that warrants life in prison" he wrote, because "[Joshua's] actions were motivated by deviant, prurient intentions" that "represent a level of depravity that cannot be explained or attributed to immaturity, impetuosity or recklessness or headless risk taking".
This was a satisfying sentence for the Clifton family, but Joshua's mother stated that an appeal with be filed. The case is up for an automatic review in about six years.
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UPDATE 21/10/2020
On December 2019 Joshua's sentence of life in prison was upheld by Florida First District Court Of Appeal and will be reviewed again. "[The sentence] could be modified at a 25-year review based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation."
