October 11, 1974 - Craig Price
What made this case historically significant was less the crimes themselves than the legal void they exposed: a juvenile system that, by its own design, had no mechanism to account for the scale of what had occurred. Having committed four murders before his sixteenth birthday, Price faced a mandatory release at twenty-one regardless of the findings of state psychologists, who assessed him as unlikely to be rehabilitated. His own reported boast about what he would do upon release galvanized public opposition and prompted Rhode Island to reform its laws on juvenile prosecution — though those reforms came too late to apply to him.
From Wikipedia
Craig Chandler Price (born October 11, 1973) is an American serial killer who committed his crimes in Warwick, Rhode Island between the ages of 13 and 15. He was arrested in 1989 for four murders committed in his neighborhood: a woman and her two daughters that year, and the murder of another woman two years earlier. He had an existing criminal record for petty theft.
Price calmly confessed to his crimes after he was discovered. He was arrested a month before his 16th birthday and was tried and convicted as a minor. By law, this meant that he would be released and his criminal records sealed when he turned 21, and Price bragged that he would "make history" when he was released.
The case led to changes in state law to allow juveniles to be tried as adults for serious crimes, but these could not be applied retroactively to Price. Rhode Island residents formed the group Citizens Opposed to the Release of Craig Price to lobby for his continued imprisonment, due to the brutality of his crimes and the opinion of state psychologists that he was a poor candidate for rehabilitation.
- Last updated on .