Trial to start for California boy who killed neo-Nazi father

Both the prosecution and the defence involved in a trial set to start this week agree on the following: before dawn on May 1, 2011, 10-year-old Joseph Hall went to his family's living room armed with a snub-nosed revolver, pointed it at his father's head as he lay sleeping on the couch, and shot and killed him.

From there, the two sides are likely to differ on both the events that preceded the shooting and Joseph's exact motive, elements complicated by his age and the fact that his father, Jeff Hall, was a rabid neo-Nazi.

Those facts raise several more philosophical quandaries that, depending on how the judge weighs the answers, may determine the outcome of the trial. Among them: whether virulent racism can amount to parental abuse, whether a child exposed to such hate can understand the difference between right and wrong, and whether someone who grows up in such toxic circumstances can be blamed for wanting a way out.

The prosecutor, Michael Soccio, says Joseph's actions have little to do with Nazism, but rather with his anger at being punished and spanked by his father at a party the day before the killing and the boy's worries his father would leave his family. Though he says he sympathises with Joseph and his upbringing - "There's a sweet side to him," Soccio said in an interview this month - he has little doubt the boy is a killer.

"What he did, had it been done by anybody older, there would be no doubt it was a murder," said Soccio, the chief deputy district attorney in Riverside county. "It's planned. It's premeditated. It was carried out in a cold, killing fashion. It is a murder."

But Joseph's public defender, Matthew Hardy, says his client has neurological and psychological problems, compounded by exposure to neo-Nazi "conditioning" and physical abuse in the home.