The gunfire, it seems, never stops. And in many cases, kids are pulling the triggers.
In South Carolina, a drive-by shooting at a park wounded 9 young people, ages 16 to 20, in the wee hours of Saturday, April 29, 2023. Police found “dozens of shell casings from several different weapons,” and arrested two teenagers fleeing the scene in a car (see story here).
In Mississippi, a teenager killed 2 teens and wounded 4 others at a house party in the wee hours of Sunday, April 30, 2023. He was arrested and is charged with murder (see story here).
Should teenage killers be held to adult standards of criminal responsibility? A 2021 article in the Guardian (here) noted,
“Beginning in 2005, the [U.S.] supreme court had concluded in a series of cases that minors should be treated differently from adults, in part because of minors’ lack of maturity. That year, the court eliminated the death penalty for juveniles. Five years later, it barred life-without-parole sentences for juveniles except in cases of murder. In 2012 and 2016 the court again sided with minors. The court said life-without-parole sentences should be reserved ‘for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility’.”
The court reasoned that juveniles aren’t as culpable as adults, because their brains aren’t fully developed. It summed up its rationale as follows: “[I]mposition of a State’s most severe penalties on juvenile offenders cannot proceed as though they were not children.” In 2015, a Washington state appeals court wrote (here) that the U.S. Supreme Court cases
“established that juvenile offenders ‘are constitutionally different from adults for purposes of sentencing.’ … The constitutional difference arises from a juvenile’s lack of maturity, underdeveloped sense of responsibility, greater vulnerability to negative outside influences, including peer pressure, and the less fixed nature of the juvenile’s character traits. … Because juveniles have diminished culpability and greater prospects for reform, they are less deserving of the most severe punishments.” It went on to say Washington judges must the court must ‘take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in prison.'”
But these rulings were handed down before Trump appointees gave conservatives a Supreme Court majority; in 2021, that court refused to reduce a Mississippi man’s life sentence for killing his grandfather when he was 15 (details of the case here), so he won’t become eligible for parole until he’s 60. This seems to suggest that “getting tough” with juvenile killers is now more acceptable in the Supreme Court’s view. What individual states like Washington do, is up to them.
This brings me to an article in Knowable magazine originally published on April 20, 2023 (here), and republished by The Atlantic on April 30, 2023 (here), discussing teenage brain development. Teens, it says, are more prone to distraction and erratic behavior, but “that doesn’t mean the teen brain is broken,” according to a neuroscientist who says, “Adolescents have all the basic neural circuitry needed for … cognitive control” and only lack experience that helps to navigate situations.
Which raises this question: How much “experience” does it take to “navigate” the right and wrong of shooting someone?
In many premodern societies (don’t call them “primitive;” the ancients were intelligent), revenge served the function of deterrence. In some social systems, wrongs could be redeemed without physical violence through the payment of “blood money.” Modern societies like ours usurp these practices by replacing them with a system of laws and courts, a taboo against revenge, and a state monopoly over punishment. The impulse for revenge hasn’t gone away, but is cloaked in the language of “justice” for the victim and “accountability” for the perpetrator.
Under this system, the victim (or survivors) don’t get to decide whether the perpetrator is prosecuted, or what the punishment is. Prisons are called “corrections” facilities, in which prisoners are “rehabilitated,” and the parole system is based on a notion of estimating whether it’s safe to release a person back into society. To many crime victims, all of this is a bad joke; but very few will resort to revenge-seeking, and what they want is to “lock ’em up.”
So what should society do when teenagers armed with guns slaughter other teens?
First of all, it would be nice if we didn’t so freely arm teenagers, but that horse appears to be out of the barn. Prosecutors, by and large, are cracking down by prosecuting underage killers as adults whenever possible, which subjects them to adult sentencing (within the limitations described above). This prevents releasing them at age 21. But that still doesn’t answer the question of what their punishment should be.
Should poor impulse control ascribable to immaturity be used to lop years off the sentences of people who prematurely terminate the lives of two, four, six, ten, a dozen other (often young) human beings? On purely a “deserve” basis, they deserve to be dead themselves. Since we’re not going to do that, they at least deserve to forfeit their own lives to a lifetime of incarceration, enjoying only such quality of life as residing in a “corrections” facility affords. But, under present rules, we’re not doing that, either.
When you contemplate dying at age 16 or younger, or being the parent of a murdered child, would you really care if the murderer poses no further threat to society if released? You want “justice,” or by its true name, retribution. The idea that someone who takes your life, or a loved one’s, especially a child’s, can get off because they’re screwed up in the head is repellant. You don’t care what their excuse is, because what they did is inexcusable.
Our courts, though, don’t see it that way. The Knowable article suggests they should take another look. Neuroscientific knowledge is evolving, and the law should evolve with it. If scientists determine that juveniles know right from wrong as fully as adults, and that’s the standard we rely on for holding people responsible for criminal acts (i.e., not legally insane), then doesn’t the rationale for giving juveniles lesser sentences because they’re juveniles go away?
Law-abiding people want to feel safe, and the constant drumbeat of news stories about teenage gun violence is deeply unsettling. The best solution is to disarm teenagers, but the present Supreme Court is a major hindrance. Its get-tough on offenders, but go easy on guns, policies are fundamentally contradictory.