Experts in Psychology, Law Discuss Juvenile Sentencing
From the article:
[...] “When the Supreme Court eliminated mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicides, it was unquestionably an earth shattering decision,” Judge Nancy Gertner, the moderator of the discussion and a lecturer at the Law School, said. “Given the plasticity of the juvenile brain, they ought to be sentenced to something that enables a right to hope.”
Panelist Robert T. Kinscherff, senior fellow in law and neuroscience at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Law School, said that high rates of juvenile homicides in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the rise of a perception by the public of the teenage “super-predator,” which influenced opinions around juvenile sentencing.
“The fear of the future was that these teen super-predators were remorseless, heartless, highly violent, and were going to somehow attack us at our castle walls and bring us all down,” Kinscherff said. “It was heard in the legislature, and elsewhere, that if you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time.” [...]