Seventeen-year-old Kevin G., tall, muscular and handsome, listened impassively as a deputy juvenile officer tried to persuade a juvenile judge to give up on him.
He'd been abandoned in a dank basement at age 6. He'd bounced among several foster homes and a boys' home, and run away repeatedly. He'd lived with his father until his father's girlfriend got tired of him. For more than a year, he'd lived where he could.
Now juvenile court workers were recommending that the court certify Kevin for prosecution as an adult on charges of murdering a 35-year-old woman as she sat in her car talking on a pay telephone.
Should the state provide rehabilitation or …