A teenage boy from Wisconsin has been charged with murdering and desecrating the corpse of his 10-year-old cousin after leading her away from her home. Defense lawyers are arguing that Carson Peters-Berger should be tried in juvenile court and given a light prison sentence despite the severity of his crimes.
According to the Daily Mail, Peters-Berger was charged as an adult with first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of sexual assault and was facing life in prison after admitting to intentionally killing and raping the corpse of his cousin. The presiding judge, Steven Gibbs, ruled in January that adult court was most appropriate in the case, noting that if Peters-Berger was tried as a youth, sentencing options would be both light and limited.
Gibbs argued that a “10-year confinement in the juvenile system” and “registering as a sex offender” would not be “punishment enough for the defendant.” But a quick appeal of Gibbs’ ruling by Peters-Berger’s defense lawyers was successful.
“The Circuit Court correctly found that he could not receive adequate treatment in the criminal justice system and that retaining jurisdiction in adult court is not necessary to deter him or other juveniles,” responded the boy’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to the ruling.
“But the Circuit Court erred in finding that transferring jurisdiction would depreciate the seriousness of the offense. In this case, putting [Peters-Berger] in adult prison for life is not necessary. It will not motivate change or cause change,” he continued, adding that “it is only punishment for the sake of punishment, which is not what the law permits” for juveniles.
“There is no evidence that imposing this harsh outcome upon [Peters-Berger] will in any way deter others. We may hope or wish that it does, but in reality, it will not change others’ behavior.”
The decision of whether to refer the case to juvenile or adult court is now back on the table. Peters-Berger is currently being held at the Northwest Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Eau Claire on a $1 million cash bond.
As noted by Judge Gibbs, if he were to be tried as a juvenile, Peters-Berger could only be sentenced to ten years in prison and would be released by the time he is 25 years old. The Wisconsin Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General have submitted 25-page brief arguing that “the crime was too serious” for him not to be tried as an adult.
“[Peters-Berger], intending to murder and sexually assault the victim, convinced her to go down a trail with him,” they wrote. The court found that [Peters-Berger] ‘admitted that the physical assault of the young victim was vicious and brutal in nature, involving punching the victim, knocking the victim down and hitting the victim with a stick.’”
The Court of Appeal is estimated to take around four weeks to make an official decision, and the case will not return to court until a decision is reached.
Peters-Berger is the son of convicted pedophile Adam Berger, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 after being caught with child sexual abuse materials on his cell phone.
Disturbingly, Berger would edit photos of young females in “spread-legged positions,” superimposing his own face onto that of the child victims.
Other photographs he had in his possession had been edited to include comments such as “first in ur little girl’s a**hole and then in ur mouth mom.”
Court papers also revealed that each photo explicitly “focused on the children’s genitalia.”
Although the boy’s grandmother expressed he was not happy after his father was imprisoned, he received emails from and spoke to his father regularly. His father also submitted a request that he be permitted to have unsupervised visitation time with his son, who he described as “the best part of me.”
