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An insider’s plan for rehabilitating the juvenile justice system | Jeff Wallace | TEDxNaperville

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Do Juvenile Killers Deserve Life Behind Bars?

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Do Juvenile Killers Deserve Life Behind Bars?

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The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in two homicide cases testing whether it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a 14-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

There are currently 79 of these juvenile killers who will die in prison. What's more, in many states, the penalty is mandatory, meaning neither judge nor jury is allowed to consider the youngster's age or background in meting out the sentence.

In cases dealing with punishment for juveniles, context is everything. In 2005, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for juveniles, declaring that kids are different from adults. The court said that because of their youth, their brains are literally less developed, they are more impulsive, more subject to peer pressure and less able to see the consequences of their acts.

Two years ago, the court used the same rationale when it struck down the penalty of life without parole for nonhomicide crimes committed by juveniles. But in Tuesday's cases, the court faces the question of life without parole in homicide cases.

There are currently 79 of these juvenile killers who will die in prison.

A case from Arkansas involves a teenager who was not the triggerman. Fourteen-year-old Kuntrell Jackson and two other kids held up a video rental store. One of the other boys pointed a sawed-off shotgun at the cashier, and when she threatened to call the police, shot and killed her. Under Arkansas' felony-murder law, Jackson was deemed just as responsible as the triggerman. He was tried as an adult for aggravated murder and, under state law, received a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

The other case, from Alabama, involves Evan Miller, a boy so brutalized as a child that by the time he was arrested for murder at age 14, he had tried to kill himself six times, the first time when he was 5 years old.

Miller and a 16-year-old friend went next-door to the home of a neighbor who was dealing drugs to Miller's mother. The neighbor, 52-year-old Cole Cannon, gave the boys liquor and marijuana. Miller consumed a fifth of whiskey as the boys engaged in drinking games with Cannon and planned to steal his wallet.

Eventually, a fight broke out and the boys severely beat Cannon, set fires in the trailer and fled, ignoring Cannon's pleas for help. Cannon died of smoke inhalation. The 16-year-old friend made a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony, and got life with parole eligibility. Fourteen-year-old Miller got life without parole.

Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer who represents the boys in both of these cases, will make two basic arguments before the Supreme Court. The first is that a mandatory punishment of life without parole for a 14-year-old is cruel and unusual punishment because the defendant's age and background are irrelevant and cannot mitigate punishment.

"Judges can't consider it. Juries can't consider it. No one can consider it," says Stevenson.

The states counter that the juvenile's age has already been considered by taking the death penalty off the table.

"If the defendant is not going to get the death penalty, then at the very least, the defendant ought to get life without parole" to counterbalance the harm he has inflicted, says Alabama Solicitor General John Neiman.

But the big question before the Supreme Court on Tuesday is whether life without the possibility of parole is itself an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment when it is applied to juveniles.

Defense lawyer Stevenson notes that the American legal system treats minors as both less culpable and less responsible. Fourteen-year-olds, for instance, are not allowed to drink, to marry, to vote, to serve on juries or even to drive.

"We're not saying that juvenile offenders who commit homicide can't be punished severely," Stevenson says. "They may even end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. But it's premature, excessive and unfair to say we know this juvenile will never be rehabilitated."

There's no sense in destroying a second life if that life is actually redeemable. If there's anyone who still has a modicum of redemption left in their life, it's a juvenile.

Indeed, a brief filed by the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators and other juvenile crime experts points to many amazing cases of rehabilitation. Among them is 16-year-old Scott Filippi, who shot his mother but after his release joined the Army and became a member of the Presidential Honor Guard.

Or there is Raphael Johnson, who shot and killed a classmate when he was 17, but after his release got bachelor's and master's degrees with honors and started a community policing program in Detroit. Or there is Lawrence Wu, a 15-year-old New York gang member who eventually became the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review.

One of the most famous of those who have changed their lives is award-winning actor-producer Charles Dutton. By age 12, he had quit school and was living a life of fights and crime on the streets of Baltimore.

"I liked getting in trouble," says Dutton. "I enjoyed getting in fights. I enjoyed the challenge of battle."

By age 17, he was sentenced to prison for manslaughter. Even in prison, though, he continued his fighting ways, assaulting a guard and getting eight years added to his sentence. A decade or so later, he was on his way to "the hole" for solitary confinement when he picked up a book of plays sent to him by a girlfriend. It ended up changing his life. As he puts it, he found what he was "born to do."

"Up until that point in time, I didn't really concentrate on the life I had taken," he says. "But only at that moment of rediscovering my own humanity [could I] go back and have a very, very strong and sincere, heartfelt remorse for taking that life." Now, four decades later, he says he thinks of the man he killed every day and wonders who he would have been.

Dutton says he understands the desire to avenge a terrible crime, but "there's no sense in destroying a second life if that life is actually redeemable. If there's anyone who still has a modicum of redemption left in their life, it's a juvenile."

The states that have adopted life without parole for juvenile killers have a very different view.

"The one thing that we don't know is what the potential of the life would be that was snuffed out in the crime," says Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. "The hypothetical of who might be rehabilitated in prison is a hard one to analyze, but there have to be some circumstances under which these persons can serve life without parole."

Indeed, Alabama Solicitor General Neiman notes that 38 of the 50 states authorize life without parole for a 14-year-old convicted of murder, and the federal government authorizes it for 15-year-olds. Part of the justification for that, he observes, is the notion of retribution.

"As a moral matter, it is OK for a government to say, even if there is a possibility that someone will rehabilitate themselves, if a person commits a sufficiently egregious crime, then they just deserve a very severe sentence," Neiman says.

Defense lawyer Stevenson counters that in reality, only 18 states have imposed life without parole on a 14-year-old, and only 79 killers who are 14 or younger are currently serving life-without-parole sentences.

Arkansas Attorney General McDaniel says that even if those statistics are accurate, and he disputes them, it doesn't prove much.

"It's not because society doesn't have the moral stomach to impose those sentences," McDaniel says. "It's because, realistically, 14-year-olds don't commit a lot of murders."

Finally, the states argue that life without parole is a sufficiently severe sentence that it will deter at least some juveniles from committing murder.

Defense lawyer Stevenson dismisses that argument, echoing the sentiments of many experts who deal with violent juveniles.

"Most of my clients had never heard of life imprisonment without parole and had no capacity to appreciate what it would mean," Stevenson says. "It takes them years before they even get what it means to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, because they're just not used to thinking that far ahead."

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Do Juvenile Killers Deserve Life Behind Bars?

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The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in two homicide cases testing whether it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a 14-year-old to life in prison without the possibility of parole. There are currently 79 of these juvenile killers who will die in prison.

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All kids make dumb mistakes. But depending on your zip code, race, or just bad luck, those mistakes can have a lasting impact. Mass incarceration starts young.

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FRONTLINE | PBS | Official Site | Documentary Series

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In the 1990s, before scientists had the tools to understand the teenage brain, judges around the country sentenced thousands of adolescents to life in prison without the chance for parole.

Many of these teens, who are now in their 30s and 40s, committed serious crimes like murder and were punished as adults.

At the time, policy makers thought "if you're old enough to do the crime, you're old enough to do the time," said Robert Kinscherff, a senior fellow in law and neuroscience at Harvard University.

But advances in brain science since the early 2000s have proved that adolescents' minds are fundamentally different from those of adults. Changes in the brain that occur during adolescence make young people more impulsive, less able to make measured decisions and more susceptible to peer pressure. At the same time, the malleable nature of the teenage brain means that people who commit crimes in their youth also have a greater capacity to reform.
This emerging science is reshaping the way juvenile offenders are sentenced in America. The Supreme Court drew on these findings in 2012 when it declared that it was unconstitutional to give children under the age of 18 a mandatory life sentence without the chance for parole. In Miller vs. Alabama, the justices ruled that it was a "cruel and unusual punishment" to force people to die in prison for crimes they committed as kids.

Since then, the court has clarified that its ruling must apply retroactively to thousands of inmates in prisons across the country. Last year, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that the court's rulings were based on the understanding that "children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change."

Prisoners around the country who were handed harsh sentences as kids were thought of as "adults with fewer miles on them," said Dr. Frances Elizabeth Jensen, who chairs the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania.
This flawed understanding, coupled with a general increase in crime in the 1980s and 1990s, fueled hysteria around the "superpredator." The term - coined by John DiIulio while he was a political science professor at Princeton University in the mid-90s - was used to conjure a coming wave of merciless juvenile criminals who would terrorize America's urban centers.

Politicians and journalists latched onto the term. Many states, in turn, handed down extreme sentences for crimes committed by teens. But the anticipated teen crime wave never materialized, and the superpredator theory was widely discredited and disavowed.

In recent years, the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, has given scientists the ability to get a more accurate understanding of the teenage brain in action.
Research shows that the frontal lobe - the part of the brain that governs planning, decision-making and weighs consequences - is still in training during the teen years. The frontal lobe is the last place in the brain to develop and does not fully mature until adults reach their mid-20s. By comparison, a part of the brain known as the limbic system, which governs emotions and our responsiveness to risk and reward, is well functioning by the teen years.

Jensen, who authored "The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents," said this combination of a more developed limbic system and a still maturing frontal lobe means that teenagers are more likely to make risky and impulsive decisions when compared to adults.

"They are experiencing emotion in technicolor and we are experiencing it in black and white," she said.

One of the vital functions that adults can play in the lives of teenagers, therefore, is to act as an "external brain," Kinscherff said. "It's not that adolescents are unintelligent, it's not as though they can't foresee consequences, they just see them differently than we do."
Teenagers are also more susceptible to peer pressure because their brains are wired to seek approval from others. One developmental psychology study by researchers at Temple University showed that teenagers around the age of 14 were twice as likely to perform a risky task if they were being observed by other peers. When the study was replicated while subjects were attached to an fMRI machine, scientists saw that teenagers' brains were more sensitive to the rewards that might follow a risky decision whereas adults brains were better able to regulate impulses.
Brain science also shows that synapses, which allow information to pass from one neuron to another, have a heightened ability to adapt during adolescence. Some synapses are strengthened with practice while others are "pruned" away if they are unused.
This flexibility allows teenagers to learn a new skill faster and remember things better than adults. However, it also means that teenagers are more likely to develop an addiction if they are exposed to drugs and alcohol since addiction is "just another form or learning," Jensen said. Law enforcement, therefore, may see more examples of teenage crimes committed under the influence or in a quest to fuel an addiction.
Finally, the science around juvenile's ability to reform has gained influence as policymakers attempt to figure out how and when to grant parole to people who were sentenced to life in prison as children or teens. Neuroscience shows that young people are much more likely than adults to change over time. In addition to the synaptic "pruning" that occurs during the teen years, human brains also undergo a process known as myelination, where neural pathways are insulated by a fatty tissue called myelin. This insulation helps to speed up the connections between different parts of the brain, including the frontal lobe, which governs decision-making. Research shows that myelin continues to grow until people reach their 30s and 40s.
"We're just at the beginning, there is a lot to learn," Kinscherff said.
Both he and Jensen envision a future where brain scans may be used to help teenagers gain a personalized understanding of their brains as they develop.
"But we're a long way from pointing a magic machine at a kid's head and saying, nah, this one was old enough, sentence him as an adult," Kinscherff added.

Correction: An earlier version of this story attributed control of sexual function and responsiveness to risk and reward to the temporal lobes. We have updated the post to clarify that these types of brain functions are governed by the limbic system.

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How Brain Science Is Changing How Long Teens Spend in Prison | FRONTLINE | PBS | Official Site | Documentary Series

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In the 1990s, before scientists had the tools to understand the teenage brain, judges around the country sentenced thousands of adolescents to life in prison. Today, emerging science is reshaping how long juveniles offenders spend behind bars.

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There are 80 "youth prisons" in U.S. Here are 5 things to know about them

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There are 80 "youth prisons" in U.S. Here are 5 things to know about them

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Newsela | There are 80 “youth prisons” in U.S. Here are 5 things to know about them

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Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Overview – The Sentencing Project

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The United States stands alone as the only nation that sentences people to life without parole for crimes committed before turning 18.