Violence in American Society

Jonathan Fajardo, who is believed to be a Latino gang member of the 204th   Street gang, walked up and opened fire on a group of black people who were just hanging out in a driveway on December 15, 2006. As a consequence, a fourteen-year-old black girl by the name of Cheryl Green was killed, and three other people were injured. Furthermore, two weeks later, a potential witness by the name of Christopher Ash was found stabbed, more than sixty times, on a roadside. Prosecutors said that a group of gang members lured Christopher into a garage and killed him. The gang members assumed that Ash was giving information to the authorities about Cheryl Greens death. Jonathan Fajardo was eighteen years old at the time of committing the crime. Now he is a twenty-two-year old, facing the death penalty.

Fajardo’s defense attorneys urged the jurors to give Fajardo the life sentence, in order for him to acknowledge the crimes. The attorneys provided two major arguments for Jonathan’s malice aforethought which included psychological and sociological factors. The psychological factor is that the perpetrator had a long-experienced depression and a misdiagnosed learning disability, which was labeled incorrectly as inactive. Thus, he is a product of neglect. His mother was busy working two jobs to make a living and his father was in custody. Besides, Jonathan Fajardo is erratic; his paranoid behavior is the result of a post-traumatic stress disorder, due to an experience of getting shot in a drive-by shooting. The sociological factor of Jonathan’s behavior is violence, because he was living in a poor neighborhood, where the 204th Street Gang is strongly established. Despite the justification of Fajardo’s reasons for committing the crime, he was convicted for the hate-crime killing of a fourteen-year-old black girl and a stabbing of a potential witness in the Harbor Gateway area. Fajardo is set to be sentenced on January 6, 2011.

The article portrays that the cause of the violence...