A 13-year-old boy in Australia charged with murder has the mental capacity to stand trial for the alleged crime, a psychologist argued, citing his reverence for gangsters and an “adherence to an alternative moral code” as proof he could be capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. The unnamed child is one of eight teens charged with killing Declan Cutler, a 16-year-old boy beaten and fatally stabbed outside a house party in the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir on March 13. In the state of Victoria, children aged between 10 and 14 cannot be prosecuted if a legal principle called doli incapax is upheld, which presumes that a child cannot be capable of forming criminal intent. A July 2021 doli incapax report by a separate psychologist concerning different offenses found the boy did not have capacity. But on Monday, a court heard a new psychologist argue that the boy’s lack of appreciation of how his alleged crimes hurt others, and his efforts to avoid self-incrimination and attitudes to police underpinned her finding that he did indeed have capacity.
