A judge in South Carolina heard arguments in late May 2023 to reconsider the sentence for Jesse Osborne, who committed a school shooting in 2016. Fourteen years old at the time, Osborne killed his father, then opened fire at Townsville Elementary School, killing a 6-year-old child and injuring others.
He was sentenced to life without parole, but his lawyers asked that a judge “give Jesse the hope” of leaving prison decades down the line. The judge ordered the defense to submit a detailed report by late June about the abuse Osborne suffered as a child and his potential for rehabilitation. He said the prosecution had 10 days to respond, although no decision had been announced as of mid-July.
At the heart of this case is whether children should be sentenced to death in prison, with no chance of being considered for release. Half a century ago, US offenders of any age were rarely sentenced to life without parole, and it wasn’t until 1978 that states began trying juveniles as adults. Between 1985 and 2001, however, juveniles convicted of murder were more likely to be imprisoned with a life sentence than adults convicted of the same crime.
Yet the use of juvenile life without parole, or JLWOP, has declined sharply over the past two decades and has been condemned by the American Bar Association, largely thanks to new research on brain development.
As a former prosecutor, I respect the need to consider the views of victims. However, I also believe it’s important to recognize that a 14-year-old’s brain is far from fully developed, and that retribution and accountability must take that into account—ideas that guide my current work as a legal scholar defending juvenile offenders.
The age of the ‘superpredator’
In 1995, political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. published an influential article arguing that the US is facing a wave of child “superpredators” who “prefer killing over evil” and “see no relationship between doing right (or wrong) now and being rewarded (or punished) for it later.”
DiIulio blames this predicted criminal behavior on “moral poverty” without “loving, competent, responsible adults teaching you right from wrong.” He repeatedly drew attention to the violence of Black youth in “inner city neighborhoods.”
While DiIulio coined the phrase “superpredator,” his message resonated with many Americans used by the “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” campaigns. America’s history of marginalizing and criminalizing Black citizens predisposed the media and the public to embrace his theory, as did many high-profile cases. The most famous, perhaps, is that of the Central Park Five, where five Black teenagers were wrongly convicted of raping a white girl in Central Park in 1989.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, before DiIulio’s article, states had been establishing harsher sentencing laws, even for juveniles. Across the country, legislatures have embraced trying children as adults and rejected policies focused on prevention and rehabilitation.
Between 1985 and 1994, the number of children tried as adults grew by 71%, and in 2012, 28 states had mandatory life sentences for the capital murders of some minors.
The “superpredator” theory turned out to be a myth: By the end of the 1990s, youth crime had actually declined, and that trajectory has continued. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of incarcerated youth will decrease by 77%.
By 2000, DiIulio retracted the superpredator theory and advocated reform. Many laws from the “superpredator” era, however, are still on the books. The US is still the only country that sentences children to life without the possibility of parole.
Transfer to the Supreme Court
However, a sea change has occurred in legal thinking, as psychologists argue that teenagers are less guilty than adults because of the nature of the teenage brain.
Beginning in the 2000s, the US Supreme Court began to recognize that juvenile offenders are different from adults. In 2005, the court banned the death penalty for people under 18, and in 2010 banned life sentences for minors convicted of nonhomicide offenses.
Two years later, in Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that, even in homicide cases, mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Judges do not ban life sentences, however—only mandate sentencing laws that require them for those guilty of homicide of children, without consideration of particular mitigating factors in each case.
In each of these decisions, the Supreme Court recognized that the lack of brain development makes teenagers, even those who have committed serious and violent crimes, less culpable and more capable of reform than adults. In Miller v. Alabama, the court emphasized that adolescents are impulsive, cannot escape abusive home environments, cannot properly assist their lawyers and have an inherent capacity for rehabilitation.
State-to-state change
This change in attitudes has a clear impact on state laws. Today, most states either prohibit or do not serve JLWOP.
More than 500 people who received their sentences before these SCOTUS cases are serving life without parole for crimes they committed as children. However, another 1,000 individuals were released because laws were changed to override their original sentencing, according to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, which advocates against JLWOP.
Virginia, for example, passed legislation in 2020 to allow people sentenced as juvenile offenders who have already served 20 years in prison to apply for parole consideration. Approximately 17 have been reviewed and granted parole so far, including seven rehabilitated individuals that I and my law students have helped.
Another aspect of youth development highlighted in the research is the potential of young offenders for rehabilitation, challenging the idea that they are irreparably dangerous. A 2020 study found that only 1.14% of people sentenced to life without parole in Philadelphia and eventually released were convicted again of any offense. Similarly, of the 142 individuals released in Michigan after the Supreme Court’s Miller decision, only one was rearrested in 2021.
The way forward
Nothing can bring back lives cut short. But in my more than 25 years of working in the juvenile legal system, I have seen time and time again that our society fails defendants and victims by not helping them resolve their conflicts before they reach that point. Those I assist as a defense attorney often come from the same backgrounds and tragic backgrounds as the victims I serve as a prosecutor.
Increasingly, however, it seems that schools, courts and communities are turning to ways other than life without parole to help young people get past the worst things they’ve done, or prevent them in the first place.
The primary goal of juvenile court is rehabilitation rather than punishment. Courts are now developing assessment tools, effective intervention programs, an identification of the roles that lack of brain development and trauma play in delinquent behavior, and treatments for underlying psychiatric disorders that can help achieve that goal—if our society has the will to invest these resources early.
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Citation: Viewpoint: Panic over supposed ‘super-predator’ teens ended years ago, but its consequences didn’t (2023, July 24) retrieved 24 July 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-07-viewpoint-panic-super-predator-teens-years.html
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