The boy before Judge Kenneth Biehn was quiet and withdrawn, an asthmatic whose mother used and sold crack cocaine and whose father was doing time for robbery.

At just 14, Kareem Watts stood accused of his own, much more horrific crime: Stabbing to death a neighbor who disrespected his mother.

He had admitted to a psychologist, “I took the knife and stabbed her.” So guilt was not in dispute.

Judge Biehn could allow this boy to be prosecuted and sentenced as an adult, likely meaning decades in prison – or he could transfer the case to the juvenile system, where the teen would be confined and receive treatment until his 21st birthday, when he’d be released onto the streets.

It was the tough call that judges and prosecutors across the nation confront when juveniles commit violent offenses: How to reconcile demands of “adult time for adult crime” when staring at a baby-faced youngster like Kareem.

State laws typically set out criteria to weigh, such as the child’s mental capacity, criminal history, likelihood of benefiting from treatment. And another factor: how best to serve the public interest and protect the community.

In the end, though, judges must rely on their own experience and instincts to make these very difficult choices – decisions that can pay off, or one day come back to haunt them.

The backstory

It happened May 15, 2000. According to court records, Kareem had spent the afternoon hanging around his Morrisville, Pa., neighborhood, playing video games with friends and smoking pot and “wet,” marijuana dipped in embalming fluid.

Around 9:30 p.m., he went to neighbor Darlyne Jules’ apartment to borrow her phone. He made a call, and Jules gave Kareem some money, telling the boy to have his mother buy her cigarettes. Kareem would later say he got angry because Jules owed his mother money and instead was shopping for smokes.

“I don’t owe her (expletive),” he recalled the woman telling him. They began to push and shove, and then Kareem saw a knife on a table.

From his bedroom upstairs, Jules’ 7-year-old son, Allin, heard his mother screaming his name and pleading, “Get the cops!”

When the boy ventured downstairs to check on her, he saw Kareem on top of his mother on the sofa, stabbing her over and over – some 70 times, police would say.

Just 13 at the time, Kareem became the youngest person in Bucks County, Pa., to be charged with first-degree murder. Under Pennsylvania law, juvenile murder defendants are automatically processed in the adult court system – unless the defense seeks to transfer the case back to juvenile court.

Kareem’s attorney, Richard Fink, filed a motion for just such a transfer.

Judge’s turmoil

Judge Biehn had never been one to agonize over decisions in his two decades-plus on the bench of the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas outside of Philadelphia. Only once in his career did a ruling leave lingering thoughts of: Was I right?

A 17-year-old honor student had been accused by a 4-year-old of sexual assault. There was no physical evidence, but the judge believed the defendant guilty. A year after Biehn sentenced him to a sexual offender program, the teen admitted his crime.

Some kids, Biehn knew, could change in the juvenile system. Some, no matter what the system did, would remain a threat.

He wasn’t sure which way Kareem Watts could go when the boy entered his courtroom for the hearing on his transfer request early in 2001.

Testimony showed the boy had been born two months premature after his mother abused cocaine and alcohol during her pregnancy.

At 7 years old, according to one psychologist’s evaluation, Kareem started hitting himself. He once tried to jump out a window.

And there were voices. Kareem told defense psychologist Robert Strochak that he had been hearing voices for as long as he could remember, and Strochak concluded that the voices “were very much in control of him” when Kareem attacked Jules.

“They told me to do it,” Kareem said, according to Strochak’s evaluation.

Nevertheless, Kareem had never before exhibited severely violent behavior.

He’d been disciplined three years earlier for bringing an unloaded pellet gun onto a school bus, but that was the extent of his record.

Biehn considered all of this, and the opinion of Strochak and a county psychologist, both of whom concluded that Kareem seemed treatable in the juvenile system.

Representatives from several adult and juvenile facilities testified about what type of confinement and services Kareem would receive. The main difference was that in the adult system, the “treatment” component could end by age 18 and Kareem would be transferred to an adult prison to serve out his sentence.

In the juvenile system, treatment could extend to age 21. But at that time, Kareem would be released, with no requirement to even report to a probation officer.

Prosecutor Gary Gambardella noted that Kareem “could be as bad as he is today or worse.”

Biehn recognized that there were no guarantees. Kareem, he said during the hearing, is not “a finished product. No one would suggest that he is, and he may never be. … No one knows.”

By the last day of the proceeding, Biehn had put most of his findings in writing. When testimony was done, he took a 15-minute recess, then returned to the bench to read his decision into the record – the case was transferred back to juvenile court.

Within minutes, after attorneys reached an agreement that Kareem would enter the equivalent of a guilty plea, the boy stood and admitted killing Jules.

Judge Biehn pronounced punishment: Kareem would spend the next seven years in a juvenile program called Alternative Rehabilitation Communities.

Case closed?

Not long before his 21st birthday this past June, Kareem returned to Biehn’s courtroom. Kareem’s juvenile probation officer, Bill Batty, read his final report, and the judge deemed the case closed. Then Biehn stepped down from the bench and gave Kareem a hug.

He was free – free to go, and as free of his past as a court and treatment could make him.

Today, Kareem works as a counselor assistant at ARC. He earned his GED and was appointed by the governor’s office to sit on a state juvenile justice committee. He declined to be interviewed, but earlier this year told the Bucks County Courier Times: “I know I’m lucky, and I’m grateful. Not many people in my situation get a second chance.”

Following sentencing that day in 2001, a cousin of Jules told a reporter through tears, “It’s not fair.” Those feelings linger among the victim’s family. Lubin did not return phone messages, but a woman identifying herself as his sister said of Kareem’s release: “That’s a damn shame. I didn’t know they was gonna let him out that soon.”

While some question second-chance gambles like Biehn’s, Kareem’s former lawyer, Fink, called the decision courageous, and right. “This boy really turned his life around,” Fink says.

Others, like Gambardella and Batty, know that only time can truly tell whether that’s true.

Says the prosecutor: “Look, I’m wrong sometimes. This is one of the times I hope I am.”