Legal culpability and brain development

This article from Science News discusses recent research on human brain development showing that there are measurable differences between teenagers' brains and those of older adults.  The killer app is an upcoming US Supreme Court case which will test the constitutionality of applying the death penalty to teenagers, as is done in the US. But, of course, there are a lot of other questions I'd like to ask.

First of all, as the article points out, there's a big gap between "there is a measurable difference" and "that difference means less legal culpability".  It's not clear just what the different nature of teenagers' brains actually means in terms of behaviour; some people are suggesting that teenagers are less able to form long-term plans and quantify the consequences of their actions, but does that mean they're less legally responsible for their actions?  And is it caused by brain differences or by socialization or something else?  Ultimately, we face the same question that has plagued philosophers of criminal law for a long time:  if someone "can't help" committing crimes as a result of mental deficiency of some sort, is it ethical to punish them?  And if not, what are we supposed to do about crime?

From my point of view as someone who would like to see young people given the power to make their own decisions, I'm not happy to see studies suggesting that they shouldn't - but if the findings are true, it would be stupid to deny them; and the factual findings don't necessarily lead inescapably to young people being stripped of their decision-making power.  Elderly adults often have decreased mental function, sometimes to an extreme, but they're generally acknowledged as being adults at all, responsible for their lives and allowed to make decisions.  When old people are disenfranchised, it's not hard to convince the rest of society that that's a bad thing.  So why shouldn't young people be dignified even if they are less able than others to perform consequence-evaluation tasks?

Sidelight:  if you commit a murder while drunk, your decision-making power at the time was clearly impaired.  Does that mean you're exempt from the harshest available penalties?  Why or why not?  Is that case different from a teenager committing a murder?  Don't get me wrong:  I think the death penalty is inhumane when applied to teenagers.  But that's partly because I think the death penalty is inhumane when applied to anyone, and partly because teenagers are denied many of the rights that ought to come with adult responsibilities.  If you think you must have a death penalty, sure, apply it to teenagers - but only after you give teenagers all the rights of older persons too.

Some of the studies discussed in the article are claiming an age for complete mental maturity as high as 26 years, which reminds me of Marlene Jenning's proposal that the age of sexual consent should be 25.  Suppose that we really believed that because of the brain changes described in that study, maturity and responsibility for one's actions and decisions didn't arrive until age 26.

Well, then we'd have to pretty much disband the military, which depends on recruiting soldiers under 26 years of age, because child soldiers are something that only dirt-bag third-world nations think are okay.  We'd have to cancel a large fraction of weddings, because child marriage is something that only dirt-bag third-world nations think is okay.  We'd have to shut down most of the economy, because child labour etcetera - and all my "What I'm Thinking About" postings and other writings prior to this entry, including for instance my Master's thesis, first novel, and 24000-word copyright reform submission, would have to be dismissed as juvenalia, because I didn't have a fully-functional brain when I wrote that stuff.

Lord knows what we'd have to do about Dr.  Erik Demaine, former student of my current academic supervisor.  (Which makes him my brother under the tenets of academic genealogy.) One of the first events I attended when I arrived in Waterloo was the party they threw for him getting his PhD and going off to be an assistant prof at MIT. His field is actually theoretical comp sci at the moment, but there's still plenty of time for him to switch to developmental neuroscience, stick his own head in the scanner, and declare himself a non-adult before he turns 26 in the year 2007.

Obviously, almost nobody is going to believe such a claim.  But if we reject "persons under 26 are not fully human", how can we not also reject all similar age-based lines?  I don't see any reason the study that says "26" is any less valid than the other ones cited in the article, which concluded with other age lines.  It looks like perfectly valid science to me; but its scientific conclusion does not automatically justify the legal consequences that would come from "incompletely developed brain equals not responsible".  And if "incompletely developed brain" is the only reason you have for why young people should be "not responsible", then the hypothetical is just as silly if you say 18 or 14!

I'd also like to emphasize that these studies are statistical in nature.  Maybe I was an adult before I was 26, or even before I was 18, but most others my age weren't.  From a legal point of view, though, that's not good enough.  If you declare all under-18-year-olds to be non-persons, as some in our society do, and any of them are actually persons, as I claim to have been, then you're committing a grave injustice.  The law ought to err on the side of caution.

It appears to me that maintaining any semblance of our current social structure will require us to accept some people as having full human rights despite knowing that they biologically do not have completely-developed brains, and in that case, I see no barrier to accepting every human being as fully human.

Which is, conveniently, just what I've been arguing for all along.

[Legal culpability and brain development]

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