Over the past twenty years, neuroscientists have discovered that brain maturation continues through an individual’s midtwenties. The United States Supreme Court cited this research to support its abolition of the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons. Now the Court is faced with two cases that challenge the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without parole. Many...

Habitat restoration can play an important role in recovering functioning ecosystems and improving biodiversity. Restoration may be particularly important in improving habitat prior to species reintroductions. We reintroduced seven brown treecreeper (Climacteris picumnus) social groups into two nature reserves in the Australian Capital Territory in south-eastern Australia. This study provided a ...

The past decade has been marked by historic opinions regarding the culpability of juveniles by the US Supreme Court. In 2005, the death penalty was abolished, 5 years later, life without parole for crimes, other than homicide, was banned, and then just last year, mandatory life sentences for any crime was abolished. The court referenced developmental science in all these cases. In this article,...

Before the abolition of the death penalty for homicide the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 defined 18 years as the minimum age for execution, the last teenager to be hanged being "Flossie" Forsythe in 1960 at the age of 18. Prior to 1966 a murderer could "hang by the neck until dead" and due to this courts were more ready to allow a culprit to be termed "insane". Since then the number of "i...

The problem of death penalty is complex by definition, entailing on one hand moral considerations, as well as commitment to the universal value of the sanctity of human life, and on the other hand some down-to-earth practical considerations. By the end of 2002, 76 states abolished capital punishment altogether. Fifteen other states allow death sentence only at wartime. Bearing in mind this over...

In the United States, the right to a jury trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment states, in part, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...

Stark racial disparities define America’s relationship with the death penalty. Though commentators have scrutinized a range of possible causes for this uneven racial distribution of death sentences, no convincing evidence suggests that any one of these factors consistently account for the unjustified racial disparities at play in the administration of capital punishment. We propose that a unify...

This paper examines the death penalty question from the perspective of the new ethical theory, the Principle of Goodness. At first sight, the Principle seems to be a strictly tighter moral principle than Kant’s categorical imperative; yet we find that the application diverges from the recommendations of Kant in this case. Unlike many discussions of this question, which often argue either no, or...

The authors use a developmental perspective to examine questions about the criminal culpability of juveniles and the juvenile death penalty. Under principles of criminal law, culpability is mitigated when the actor's decision-making capacity is diminished, when the criminal act was coerced, or when the act was out of character. The authors argue that juveniles should not be held to the same sta...

Behavioral science data included in an amicus brief has been introduced into a recent Supreme Court decision (Thompson v. Oklahoma) involving the juvenile death penalty. However, a close examination of the data fails to provide support for either the pro- or antijuvenile death penalty position.