Brain Data Used to Argue Against Executing Minors
Progress is being made toward outlawing the death penalty for juvenile offenders, speakers at a briefing on the “Science of Adolescent Development and Its Implications for the Juvenile Death Penalty” maintained.
The briefing was held in Washington, D.C., in February and was conducted by leading juvenile death-penalty opponents, notably APA Trustee-at-Large David Fassler, M.D. It was sponsored by APA, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, National Mental Health Association, and Criminal Justice Reform Education Fund.
The annual death sentencing rate for juvenile offenses has been declining rapidly in the United States and is now at the lowest point in 15 years, facts and figures provided at the briefing showed.
Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Fassler and other psychiatrists, more and more states are voting to end the execution of those who committed crimes as juveniles, Stephen Harper, a Miami lawyer and coordinator of the Juvenile Death Penalty Initiative, said (Psychiatric News, March 19; May 16, 2003).
Currently, the federal government and 31 states prohibit executing those who committed crimes as juveniles (see box), and 38 states have no juvenile offenders on death row, data presented at the briefing showed.
In August, in the case of Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled that the death penalty for juvenile offenders—that is, those under age 18—violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal of the Missouri decision in its 2004-05 term.
But opponents of allowing the execution of people who committed crimes as juveniles insist that more work must still be done to end it everywhere. A case in point: Texas, Florida, and Alabama account for half of all juvenile-offender death sentences over the past 20 years, almost two-thirds of recent executions of juvenile offenders have occurred in Texas, and Texas currently has 28 juvenile offenders facing a death sentence (by far the most of any state).
Some of the medical evidence being used to argue against the death penalty for juvenile offenders—that is, evidence indicating that adolescents’ brain use is not as mature as that of adults and that adolescents’ brain development is not as advanced as that of adults—was also highlighted at the briefing.
For instance, MRI scans have revealed that adolescents rely more on the amygdala (a primitive part of the brain) than they do on the frontal lobes (more advanced areas of the brain crucial to judgment and decision making), Fassler pointed out. What he tells state legislatures, he said, is that “if you have an amygdala holding up a gas station with a loaded gun, it is more likely to go off unless you have a frontal cortex to stop it.”
True, people have most of the neurons in their brains that they are ever going to have when they are born, Ruben Gur, Ph.D., chief of the University of Pennsylvania’s Brain Behavior Laboratory, said. But for these nerve cells to function appropriately, he explained, they also need to develop fatty sheaths (myelin) around their axons, and such myelination in the brain’s frontal lobes isn’t complete until people reach their 20s.
In fact, if he had his way, Gur said, he would not allow the death penalty to be imposed on people who commit crimes before age 23, because “the frontal lobes are not yet on board during adolescence.”
Such medical evidence, Harper added, is “just starting to penetrate the legal world.” ▪
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Published online: 2 April 2004
Published in print: April 2, 2004
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The federal government and 31 states prohibit the execution of those who commit crimes as juveniles. But some states are not about to move in that direction.
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