Should Juveniles Be Sentenced To Life In Prison

Imagine this. You are happily married with an amazing son who is your whole world. He is currently fourteen years old and nothing could be better. One day he is peer pressured into holding a gun for a friend who claims it is no big deal. His friend tells him to shoot if anyone comes around the corner while he breaks into the closed store. He hears a noise, and reacting too quickly to process, he pulls the trigger and kills the innocent woman simply going for a walk. He is sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole and your baby boy is gone forever. Would you try to challenge the law? Would you agree with the majority who say life in prison without parole for juveniles is unfair? In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled juveniles could no longer be sentenced to life in prison without the …show more content…
Minority disagrees and for good reason. Teenagers and younger are influenced by many factors: friends, media, peer pressure. All these things cause kids to act irrationally and quickly without thinking of the consequences of these actions. Many want to blame these actions on their lack of brain development. Paul Thompson writes in his article that youths have a “diminished capacity for controlling erratic behavior [due to] massive loss of brain tissue [which causes inability to] control impulses and self-control” (Startling). Many court cases have tried to use this lack of brain tissue as an excuse for committing their crime. Youths do have less knowledge, but their ability to know if shooting someone is a bad act, is still present. Arguing this as being a legitimate excuse, Jennifer Jenkins points out that if “brain development were the reason, then teens would kill at roughly the same rates all over the world. [but] They do not” (On). So, researchers cannot blame the brain development, so they search for something else to excuse them from their terrible