Brain chemistry?
Michael, who is the reigning Comment of the Day champion, comes up with another here regarding the Kevin Coffay sentence and the mitigating factor in juvenile crimes, supported by brain chemistry research, that adolescents are not as capable of rational decision-making as adults, and therefor should not be punished as severely for their reckless acts. This is his post regarding “A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence.”
“Don’t go overboard with the studies that show adolescents are incapable of being responsible, thinking rationally, or evaluating risks. If you look at such studies, they are done in a vacuum and merely state that older people are BETTER at evaluating risks (duh). The main point is that our brains continue to develop until 25 or so. Much like Titanic research, however, this research is interpreted wildly and without considering evidence to the contrary.
“My father and uncles were apprenticed as toolmakers starting at about 7 years of age (to my grandfather). Throughout history, people have been apprenticed in and worked in dangerous fields from early ages. If you had history classes in school, you will remember that the founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were working at 12 and 13 and supporting themselves. They were the same species as we have today. The difference isn’t biological, it is environmental. Children today don’t have to evaluate risks, they are nonexistent. They have reached the age of 15 or 16 and never had to face the consequences of their actions. Kids don’t play with tools in elementary school anymore, so they don’t learn how easy it is for a hammer to smash a thumb, a knife or saw to cut you. They don’t jump out of trees and break legs anymore or play on playground equipment that isn’t idiot-proofed. They live in a world where if they are able to hurt themselves, someone else is at fault (and sued).
“Brain development is NOT the reason they engage in risky behavior. Yes, we get wiser when we get older, but that doesn’t mean we have to be blithering fools until 25 and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be held accountable for our actions until then either. By 25, Alexander the Great had conquered all the way to Egypt and was headed to Persia.”
Ethics Alarms 
People might not have changed, but the world has. In Benjamin Franklin’s day, not too many people used vehicles that can ordinarily go at 100 km/h. Not even horses can consistently run that fast. I’m not saying that adults have become fully adjusted to the risks of automobiles, but the fact that young people have trouble with them is not surprising.
Also, it is true that children used to work at a very young age, but after the introduction of modern industrial machinery, a lot those children were also injured or killed at a young age.
For the average person, the world has, in many ways become riskier, so it is no surprise that people (including young people) have trouble coping and make mistakes.
I think you will find the opposite is true. Although there are dangerous places in the world, the United States in incredibly safe. This is why the kidnapping or accidental death of a child can make national news. It is unusual. Even in the early 20th century, a scratch could kill you through infection. Life expectancy increased from 49 years in 1990 to over 75 years in 2000. That is a measure of how much safer life is now.
People were killed by industrial machinery because those factories were death traps. They often had a central power shaft with belts running off of it to the individual work stations. There were no guards. If you turned around without looking, tripped, sneezed, etch you were pulled into the works. It wasn’t just children injured, however, it was everyone. The fact that children did work there and they weren’t all killed the first week shows that they can, indeed, deal with risk analysis and learn to be careful.
I did not say that the world has become riskier in every way, just in many ways. The introduction of clean water, sewage systems, food quality standards and antibiotics has indeed made the world much safer, but this isn’t because the ordinary person is better at dealing with risks but because better technology and an increased willingness on the part of society to engage in public works has reduced some risks and mitigated the consequences of the materialization of others. Society has also become less violent over the last few centuries, but this means that the risk that others will intentionally harm you have decreased, not that the risk that you will accidentally harm yourself or others has decreased.
Industrial equipment was and remains dangerous in ways that pre-industrial technology generally was not. Part of the reason why machines have become safer since the industrial revolution is because of increased safety training and standards but also because the age at which people are considered mature enough to begin to use them has gone up.
Which is why the Supreme Court, in the case involving two minors sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in murder, should avoid creating a categorical rule that bans life imprisonment without parole for any juvenile offender, regardless of the circumstances.
True, as a general rule juveniles are less culpable than adults, and they should be presumed to be less culpable. This does not mean they are never as culpable as adults. At the very least, prosecutors should be allowed to make a case that a particular juvenile offender was as culpable as an adult.
To be sure, in most cases prosecutors would fail to make such a case, and juvenile offenders would not be sentenced to life without parole. And the criminal defendants in the case before the Court do have a reasonable case that the sentencing courts failed to take their youth into account.
But if their individual circumstances mean that life without parole is cruel and unusual as applied to them, the Court should simply limit the ruling to their circumstances, not create a categorical rule that would exclude all juvenile offenders from life without parole.
What happened to this Ejercito?
Although children can learn to be careful, they are much more easily distracted. Although in ideal conditions children may cope with the dangerous parts of life, they may all to easily find themselves in difficulty when they need to multitask safety with other tasks.