A boy who says he was imitating body-slamming pro wrestlers when he killed a little girl at age 12 was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a judge refused to reduce his first-degree murder conviction.
Tears rolled down Lionel Tate's cheeks as the boy, now 14, was led away in handcuffs and leg shackles Friday to begin serving the sentence, which was mandatory under a tough-on-crime Florida law enacted in the mid-1990s.
Tate becomes one of the youngest defendants in the US ever to be sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The prosecutor himself suggested the sentence was too harsh, but he also noted that the boy's lawyer and his mother had repeatedly rejected a plea bargain that would have meant only three years in a juvenile prison.
In imposing sentence, Judge Joel Lazarus called the slaying of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick "cold, callous and indescribably cruel."
Tate was found guilty Jan. 25 of beating Tiffany to death at his home. Tiffany suffered a fractured skull, a lacerated liver and more than 30 other injuries on July 28, 1999, from being punched, kicked, stomped and thrown.
During the trial, the defense argued that the 76kg boy did not mean to kill the 21kg girl and thought he could body-slam people and they would walk away unhurt, just like his wrestling idols on television.
On Friday, the judge rejected a defense request to throw out Tate's conviction or reduce it to second-degree murder or manslaughter, saying: "The evidence of Lionel Tate's guilt is clear, obvious and indisputable."
The judge also questioned the defense argument that Tate was imitating pro wrestlers. "It is inconceivable that such injuries could be caused by roughhousing or horseplay or by replicating wrestling moves," he said.
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