Publication Date

2015

Abstract

The law has long recognized the distinction between adults and children A legally designated age determines who can vote exercise reproductive rights voluntarily discontinue their education buy alcohol or tobacco marry drive a car or obtain a tattoo The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld such agebased restrictions most recently constructing an Eighth Amendment jurisprudence that bars the application of certain penalties to juvenile offenders and a Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that contemplates an adolescentbased standard of reasonableness for the Miranda v Arizona custody analysis In the cases of Roper v Simmons Graham v Florida Miller v Alabama and JDB v North Carolina the Court's jurisprudence of youth relies on emerging neuroscience to confirm what the parents of any teenager have long suspected adolescents' cognitive abilities and thought processes differ from their adult counterparts Children are different than adultsIn the cases of Roper Graham and Miller the Court recognized that brain development affects the legal construct of culpability and should accordingly affect punishment In the Roper case line the Court reasoned that without mature thought processes and cognitive abilities adolescents as a class fail to achieve the requisite level of culpability demonstrated in adult offenders As such juveniles were categorically spared the death penalty and in some instances a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole Likewise in JDB the Court concluded that the reasonableness of a juvenile defendant's perception of custody under Miranda v Arizona must be ageappropriate The Court concluded that as a class adolescents had a different understanding of custodial status than adults Courts contemplating the validity of a perception of custody under Miranda had to account for this difference in their analysisTo date the Court has limited the application of this principle to punishment and consent analysis under Miranda The logic of the Court's decisions however applies just as strongly to the application of substantive criminal law Likewise scholars writing in the field have limited the application of neuroscience to either the territory staked out by the Court or to objective mens rea standards alone The science however does not support such limitations Just as modern neuroscience counsels against the imposition of certain penalties on juvenile offenders and an adjustment of Miranda's reasonableness analysis so it counsels toward a reconsideration of culpability as applied to juvenile offenders through the element of mens rea The failure to extend this jurisprudence of youth to every mental state element undermines the very role of mens rea as a mechanism to determine guilt

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