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Juvenile Justice

By standdown

The Los Angeles Times carried the editorial, "California's juvenile injustice system," in yesterday's edition.Children, even really bad ones, are different from adults. That basic truth is the foundation of our juvenile justice system, which seeks to protect society from violent youth while recognizing that they haven't yet developed an adult's brainpower, resistance to peer pressure, judgment and thus moral capacity. It's the underpinning of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Roper vs. Simmons, which banned execution of inmates for crimes they committed as children.That doesn't stop California from locking up children as young as 14 for life without even the most remote possibility of parole. There are more than 200 such offenders living out their lives in prison here, with no chance -- despite any maturing, any repentance, any burgeoning awareness of the wrongness of their actions -- of asking for parole, even decades into adulthood...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on May 01, 2009 (boomark / email).