brisbane autistic boy's hands blown by sadistic mate

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I felt sick when I heard this. Poor boy. This is so sad. I hope he gets the best possible treatement, to help him rebuild his life. As for the 'friend', attempted murder is the charge I would be calling for. If the explosion was strong enough to blow off this boy's his fingers, it could have killed him. Maybe the bomb maker didn't realise that the blast would be so strong, but he should have thought of that before giving something to someone that he must have known was dangerous. I'm generally a liberal-minded person. But, when it comes to someone causing harm to another, especially something as revolting as this, I've no time for leniency.

I know this was a home-made bomb, but this is the very reason I'm nervous around Guy Fawkes Night (5th November), which involves a lot of fireworks being sold. Any idiot can get hold of fireworks and every year we hear of some numbskull having a go at a prank, usually involving a poor defenceless animal, but sometimes involving an innocent bullied child. I know these people could use anything as a weapon, but for some reason they seem to think that exploding things are funny.

...Jaden-
What , you mean my 11 lines ?????????

[Moved from General Autism Discussion to News and Current Events]

(Just to ensure it's seen by a different audience who might otherwise have missed it)

I read the story and watched the video.
According to the video the other kids ran from the scene which makes them look even more guilty.

This was not joking or a youthful prank or even bullying.

This was a pre-meditated attack, using a homemade weapon, specifically and legally, an IED.

This focused, intelligent, cruel person knew how to make an explosive device and did so.

He knew the probable result...there's nothing BUT television, radio, and Internet reports about deaths and crippling injuries from bombs, grenades, and, in Boston, pressure cookers!

He attacked the Autistic boy. He possibly meant to kill him. How can a debate even exist?

He is a 'clear and present danger', to use a legal term.

Can any soft-hearted judge or politician answer this:

Instead of a trial and imprisonment, instead of mandatory ten years minimum in a locked psych facility, are you willing to take this misguided young man home to live with you and your family?

I did not think so.


Sylkat

I'll be curious to hear more about the details of the bomb, as to my mind, that will reveal more about the intent of it's use, and possibly it's origin. There are a number of factors arousing my interest here, notably that the bomb appears to have been impact detonated rather than fuse detonated, that there doesn't appear to have even been a fuse or other means of ignition, and that the presence of ball bearings has been claimed. The impact detonation suggests a shock sensitive explosive, the lack of a fuse might indicate that this was an intentional design for throwing, and the ball bearings make it an anti personnel device, if they actually were there. I have my doubts on that, as golf balls are pretty small and are not hollow, and hollowing one out enough to fit explosives and shrapnel seems overly complicated considering the hard, thick material the golf ball is made of in the first place; I suspect the shrapnel was simple the casing of the golf ball itself.

Here's where it gets interesting; I'm personally familiar with this device, or at least a close cousin. When I was in middle school, my friends and I would spend hours cutting the heads off of strike anywhere matches, then cut slits in tennis balls, fill them full of match heads, and wrap the whole thing in several layers of strapping tape. When you threw one of these things hard at something, the friction would cause the matchheads to ignite, and the tennis ball would explode with a bang and a huge cloud of sulfurous smoke, most of the time; other times the tape would blow out and the thing would take off like a rocket or one of those spinning fireworks or nothing would happen at all. To us, this was a cool home made firework, fun to make and set off just for the thrill of the sound and the smoke, but I know that some of the older kids at the time used to throw them from cars at each other. No one ever got hurt that I know of, probably in part because tennis balls are made of rubber, and so there really isn't any shrapnel produced when one goes off, but kids were still essentially throwing bombs at each other.

Now, I imagine that if you drilled a hole in a golf ball, packed it full of match heads, and epoxied the hole shut, you'd get something pretty similar to the Australian device. Further, if you built such a thing, thew it from a car at someone, and it failed to detonate (likely, since the hard shell of the golf ball is more shock resistant than that of a tennis ball), it could have ended up on the side of a road for some younger kids to find, not knowing what it was. This would jibe pretty exactly with the story told by the alleged perpetrator, and may be a reason that the police have not arrested him yet, as it is in fact a plausible explanation of what happened. So, in light of this, while I'm going to express deep sympathy for the victim, I'm going to reserve judgment about everyone else until more information comes in.

I should also point out that attempted murder, even assuming the device was constructed by the person who threw it and that he intended for it to go off, would not be the appropriate charge here. Murder requires intent to kill, and it would be pretty hard to argue that one kid intended to kill another in a room full of people with an improvised explosive; aggravated assault or something in that vein is the better choice.

I'm not so sure; if I was in a room and something unexpectedly exploded, I'd probably run too. That might eve bolster their defense that they didn't know that the golf ball was a bomb.

In what court room? They're the ones that gave it to the victim.

They say they found by the side of the road and didn't know what it was. Running from the unexpected explosion could be seen as bolstering this story, as could the fact that they were even in the same room where they were allegedly expecting a shrapnel filled bomb to explode.

Granted, but who would believe that they had found a golf ball "somewhere", then took it to the victim claiming that there was drugs in it, and giving it to the victim? It would stand to reason in any court that since they lied about drugs being in it (since the story you presented would suggest that they didn't have a clue about the ball anyway, and even if they had, it's still a lie since it was a bomb), they could also be lying to save their own skins and their testimony would be suspect at best.
Someone who builds a bomb, isn't just going to leave it somewhere, the act of building it alone is enough to suggest use of the weapon, and use it they would.
It's not hard to build a bomb, no matter how small, so I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one: The Kids built the bomb with intent to harm the victim (for whatever reason), it explodes with them there unexpectedly (the kid was tossing it around when it went off, so it stands to reason they could have been expecting it to go off when they weren't there, or maybe they're just sadistic enough to want to watch, knowing that their reaction to the explosion could be seen as innocence) so they freak out and lie to save their own skins from punishment.
Even if they meant it as a prank (firecrackers for example), this has become a very serious thing and they know it.

If you read the original article there are two versions of the incident from the victim and his mother.
These are all the details available, maybe you should try to limit fabricating your own version of events until more is known?

If that little as*hole really had just intended this as a prank - with that much explosive power - then the real dummy here wasn't the kid with autism.
Even if it's determined this was only a joke, that little bastard should still serve years behind bars.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

maybe it might just be educational for the little bastard who did this, for the judge to sentence him [before his jail] to a week without the use of his hands. like they should be thoroughly bandaged up to where they are just useless appendages, and see how he likes that week, and see if he learns anything useful from it. just a jejune thought, I suppose. but i'm at my wit's end with these sociopaths.

I think a week is much too short.

I'm more inclined to believe the person who had their hands blown off because of the incident than anyone, I saw the video, I heard what he said, and I've drawn a conclusion based on that. I haven't "fabricated" anything, instead I've drawn a reasonable hypothesis as to what has happened using what is known and what the victim has said, which is exactly what everyone else has to do in order to actually find out what happened.

I think you should go back and have another go at reasoning.