"It's not because there wasn't an attempt at a robbery, but that's not what this case is about. It's not about stealing something from the dairy; it's about Mr Kumar being killed by those young men," said crown prosecutor Kieran Raftery.
Ms Pecotic was critical of the terminology of the prosecutor, who called her client "a young man".
"Legally he is a child," she said.
To fully understand what happened in the brief moments captured on footage inside the dairy, Ms Pecotic said, "we need to go back in time".
On April 12, 2009, the defendant suffered a serious head injury when a car hit him. There was no follow-up medical care, the court heard.
"So this is a 13-year-old boy who goes into the dairy ... He was not an average 13-year-old without a brain injury, without a history of drug use and neglect, and not a man as the Crown has said," Ms Pecotic said.
She pointed out her client did not look at the till when he entered but focused his attention on the fridges.
"If [the defendant] had the intention to cause grievous bodily injury, he wouldn't have lifted his left hand towards Mr Kumar. He would've immediately used his right hand with the knife, I suggest," the lawyer said.
His co-accused's lawyer, David Niven, accepted it had been his client's idea to go out that morning and persuaded his co-defendant to join him. But he said there was barely any planning about what was to happen.
He said the jury would have to decide whether the younger accused assisted in the attempted robbery.
"And did he know what [the older boy] did was a probable consequence of carrying out the robbery?"
The defence lawyer also drew the jury's attention to the CCTV footage, depicting the teen standing in the shop's doorway, which he said showed his client was not guilty.
"This is an instinctive reaction to what he sees in front of him - he steps backwards," Mr Niven said.
"If the plan was for the weapons to be used, this is the time you would use them, but he does the opposite."
