Calif. boy comes to trial in killing of neo-nazi father
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Both the prosecution and the defense involved in a trial that was set to start here Monday agree on the following: Before dawn on May 1, 2011, 10-yearold Joseph Hall went to his family’s living room armed with a snub-nosed revolver, pointed it at his father’s head as he lay sleeping on the couch, and shot and killed him.
From there, the two sides are likely to differ on the events that preceded the shooting and Joseph’s exact motive, elements complicated by his age and the fact that his father, Jeff Hall, was a rabid neo-Nazi. And it is those facts that raise philosophical quandaries that, depending on how the judge weighs the answers, may well determine the outcome of the trial.
Among them: whether virulent racism can amount to parental abuse; whether a child exposed to such hate can tell right from wrong; and whether someone who grows up in such circumstances can be blamed for seeking a way out.
The prosecutor, Michael Soccio, says the actions of Joseph Hall have little to do with Nazism, but rather with his anger at being punished and spanked by his father at a party the day before his killing and the boy’s worries that his father would leave his family. Though he says he sympathizes with Joseph and his upbringing he also has little doubt that the boy is a killer.
But Joseph’s public defender, Matthew Hardy, says his client has neurological and psychological problems, compounded by exposure to neo-Nazi “conditioning” and physical abuse in the home.
“He’s been conditioned to violence,” Hardy said, adding, “You have to ask yourself: Did this kid really know that this act was wrong based on all those things?”
Instead, Hardy said Joseph thought he was being a hero by shooting his father.
Joseph Hall’s case is also unusual because such acts of violence by children are exceedingly rare. Kathleen Heide, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, conducted a study of such killings and found only 16 arrests of a child under the age of 11 in the killing a parent between 1976 and 2007, roughly one every two years.
Children who are accused of murder present special challenges to courts, said Heide , because of the longstanding legal belief that children are incapable of formulating the intent to commit the crime and do not understand the magnitude of its consequences. Children that young often do not grasp “that death means forever gone,” she said.
California’s penal code also says that children under 14 cannot be charged with a crime without clear proof that “they knew its wrongfulness.”
But Soccio said that Joseph — who had a history of violence, including an attack that involved wrapping a telephone cord around a teacher’s neck — needed to be in a security setting “receiving as much help as possible for as long as possible.”
“I’ve had some people say, how can you do that to a little kid?” said Soccio. “And I ask them, ‘ Well, would you like him to come live with you?’ ”
Whatever strategy the lawyers use, life inside the Hall household will likely come up, and Joseph may take the stand himself, Soccio said. The court could also see testimony from members of the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Movement, of which Hall was a West Coast leader.
That raises the question of whether Hall’s rhetoric, which included “sieg heils” and neo-Nazi get-togethers in the home, amounted to psychological abuse. Hardy said Joseph had endured episodes of domestic violence and child abuse “as well as the atmosphere that’s created by the neo-Nazi activities.” In one case, Hardy said he had a photograph of Joseph holding an automatic pistol standing next to an individual in Ku Klux Klan regalia.
Joseph is living at juvenile hall in Riverside, going to school on the grounds of the facility, and is eligible for family visits on weekends and counseling.
Soccio said Joseph worried that his father was cheating on his stepmother and that “his family might be falling apart.” But he remains skeptical that Hall’s Nazism had much to do with the murder. Rather, he thinks back to something he said the boy told investigators in the hours after the killing.
“Joseph said at one point,” Soccio recalls, “‘This father and son thing had to come to an end.’ ”