Willie Bosket

In 1995, New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield wrote All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (ISBN 0-307-28033-0), an examination of the escalating violence and criminality in succeeding generations of the Bosket family where he described Willie Bosket's life as marred in violence and dysfunction from its beginning.

Since his conviction for the 1989 assault, Bosket (NYSDOCS inmate number 84A6391) has been housed in solitary confinement. While at Woodbourne, nominally a medium-security prison, Bosket was housed in a specially-built plexiglass-lined cell stripped of everything but a cot and a sink/toilet combination, with four video cameras watching him at all times. He was only allowed out of his cell for one hour a day, apart from medical visits and haircuts. Although he was allowed visitors, they could only speak to him through a window in his cell.

Bosket once declared "war" on a prison system that he claimed made him a "monster," and was cited for almost 250 disciplinary violations from 1985 to 1994. However, he has not had a disciplinary violation since 1994. According to a 2008 report in The New York Times, due to his numerous incidents of violence during the 1980s and 1990s, he was initially not slated to move into the general population until 2046, when he will be 84 years old. Department spokesman Erik Kriss told the Times, "This guy was violent or threatening violence every day. Granted, it has been a while, but there are consequences for being violent in prison. We have zero tolerance for that."

A year after he began serving his sentence for the two murders, Bosket escaped from the youth facility. He was caught after two hours, tried as an adult for the escape and sentenced to four years in state prison. He was returned to the Division of Youth in 1979, and was released in 1983. After 100 days he was arrested when a man living in his apartment complex claimed Bosket had robbed and assaulted him. Then while awaiting trial on that crime, Bosket assaulted several court officers. He was found guilty of attempted assault for the dispute in the apartment and sentenced to seven years in prison.

On March 19, 1978, Bosket, then fifteen years old, shot and killed Noel Perez on a train operating on the New York City Subway's 3 train during an attempted robbery near the Harlem–148th Street terminal station. Eight days later, Bosket and another accomplice shot dead another man, Moises Perez (unrelated to his first victim) in another attempted robbery at the back of another 3 train at the 145th Street station, one station south of 148th Street. In between, Bosket and his accomplice shot a New York City Transit employee working in the Lenox Yard adjacent to the Harlem–148th Street station and committed two other armed robberies, one of them on the A service.

The short length of Bosket's sentence caused a public outcry. Governor Hugh Carey had opposed efforts by his opponent in that year's gubernatorial election, State Assembly Minority Leader Perry Duryea, to have juveniles tried as adults for certain crimes. However, after reading a report on Bosket's sentence, Carey called the state legislature into special session to pass the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978. Under this act, children as young as thirteen years old could be tried in an adult court for crimes such as murder, and receive the same penalties as adults. New York was the first state to enact a law of this nature; all of the other states have since followed suit. Because it was Willie Bosket's case that was used to push laws allowing juveniles to be tried as adults, it is sometimes referred to as the Willie Bosket Law.

William James Bosket Jr. (born December 9, 1962) is an American convicted murderer, whose numerous crimes committed while he was still a minor led to a change in New York state law, so that juveniles as young as 13 could be tried as an adult for murder and would face the same penalties. He has been in either prison or reformatories for all but 18 months since 1971, and has spent all but 100 days of his adult life in custody. He is currently serving a sentence of 82 years to life at Five Points Correctional Facility.