Executing juvenile murderers: Is it just?

In the early 1970s while I was studying criminology at the University of Toronto, I spent one of the four years I was there studying abnormal psychology. This doesn't make an expert but after working as a counsellor with young offenders for several years in correctional facilities, I have some idea of what makes them commit crimes.

Amnesty International said that Iranian authorities executed at least eight juvenile offenders in 2008. Iran was the only country in the world in which juvenile offenders were known to have been executed that year. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights accused the government of Iran of violating international law by executing juveniles. These executions are obviously to be in a clear violation of international law, which prohibits the death penalty for juvenile offenders.

Iran's legal obligation not to impose the death penalty for juveniles was assumed voluntarily when it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which prohibit the death penalty for crimes committed by people below the age of 18.

Iran is one of very few countries in the world that still executes juveniles. Most countries have abolished the death penalty for young offenders or have put a moratorium on this practice.

Juveniles in Iran face the death penalty for murder, rape and drug trafficking. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that executing someone for committing rape is foolhardy. If a rapist is going to be executed for rape, he might think he has a better chance of getting away with the crime by killing his only witness to the crime, the witness being his rape victim since the penalty for both is death.

Two of the eight executed in 2008 were Reza Hedjazi who was believed to have been executed on August 19, and Behnam Zaare a week later on August 26. Apparently these youths are reported to have been 15 and 16 years old when they committed their crimes.

Besides Iran, the United States, China, Congo and Pakistan have put juvenile offenders to death this decade, according to Human Rights Watch however, in 2004, the Supreme Court of the United States (in Roper v. Simmons) banned the practice of executing offenders who were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes.

Juvenile offenders executed in the United States consists of 22 young people who were executed for criminal offenses for which they were convicted while they were still under the age of 18. Those executions occurred after the 1976 U.S. moratorium on capital punishment was lifted. The youngest person to be executed in the 20th century in the United States was a convicted murderer, a black boy named George Stinney. He was executed in the electric chair at the age of fourteen, in 1944. The last execution of a juvenile in the United States was convicted murderer, Leonard Shockley, who was executed on April 10, 1959 at the age of 17. Sean Sellers, was executed on February 4, 1999 in Oklahoma, because when he was 16, he murdered his mother, step-father, and a store clerk. Scott Allen Hain on the 3rd of April 2003 was the last person executed in the United States for crimes committed by the offender as a minor. Hain was put to death by Oklahoma for a double murder and kidnapping he committed when he was 17 years old. Hain and Robert Lambert carjacked an automobile in Tulsa that was occupied by Michael Houghton and Laura Sanders. Hain and Lambert eventually stopped the car, robbed Houghton and Sanders, and placed them in the trunk of the car. Hain set fire to the car, which resulted in Houghton and Sander burning to death.

I am sure that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that some of the most horrific crimes are committed by juveniles when they were under the age of 18 and I am also convinced that no one feels that these killers should not be punished severely if it is determined that they were not suffering from a mental illness when they committed the murders.

Capital punishment is the ultimate punishment for murder and the alternative punishment with respect to severity is natural life in prison without parole. Before I deal with what might be a suitable punishment for juvenile murderers, I will go directly to the minds of these offenders.

Mental illness alone is not the reason why offenders under the age of 18 commit murder since the overwhelming majority of troubled kids are not homicidal. Rather, the crimes of murder are caused by complex combinations of environmental, family, and individual factors that vary from perpetrator to perpetrator.

For example, many young gang members have no qualms about shooting persons to death for the prestige they will get from their fellow gang members. If they live in a crime-ridden area and their parents (generally their mother) can’t control them and they are ingesting illicit drugs; shooting an innocent victim for the thrill of it or for the prestige they will acquire is no different to them than stealing a car.

Children as young as four have a natural sense of justice. They may not follow rules but they do appear to know what is right and what is wrong and that knowledge remains with them for the rest of their lives.

Our passions and our drives are as much as our brain’s creation is with respect to our intellect and reason. They are all brought to life in a small amphitheater of tissue known as the limbic system. Inside that area, which is one-fifth of our brain, the cold world of reality is transformed into a swirling caldron of human feelings. The forces of fear, elation, grief, anger and lust arise from this primitive region of the human brain that evolved so long ago. Put another way, the raw material of emotion is built into the circuitry of the limbic system. Above the hypothalamus is the amygdale, a mass of nerve cells thought to be related to feelings of rage and aggression. Situations in our lives can stimulate that mass of nerve cells that can incite fury.

Even though our brains are cut from the same template of Homo sapiens, each of us responds differently to stress and disappointment from the moment of our births. Our basic neuronal wiring (so to speak) is determined by both our genetic blueprint and our pre and postnatal environment which helps determine how the connections within our brains get hooked up.

Our brains consist of two types of nerve cells called neurons and gliad cells. The neurons numbering in the billions are with us at the time of our births, ready and waiting to connect themselves together in flexible networks to fire messages within and between parts of the brain. No new cerebral cortical neurons will be added after our births and in fact, they begin dying off from that moment on. Each of these nerve cells is capable of communicating with thousands of other neurons so the potential for neural networking is virtually incomprehensible. Surrounding glial cells provides a catering service for our nervous systems, supporting and nourishing the neurons as they go about their delicate task of creating, firing and maintaining the connections for our ever changing thinking minds.

Our brains are always continuing to be altered structurally at the cellular level by encounters we have with other people. As the structures of dendrites and synapses change in response to new experiences that we encounter, new pathways are formed to allow different functions to follow so that we as children or adults, are always changing our ways of thinking. As an analogy, it is like heading towards a new town we have never been at and on the way to our destination, we are switching routes that we believe will serve our purposes. If we choose to return to that town, we may also choose to keep to the original route we took without any intention of looking for an alternative route.

A young offender who has conditioned himself to think and plan his life in a certain way, may very well become fixed in that behaviour just as the wiring (structures of dendrites and synapses) in his brain remain fixed because of his refusal to choose an alternate path.

Human brains depend on these hard-wired systems that are already molded but despite that, we also have uncommitted tissue in our brains that is capable of molding itself around to new demands that we are faced with. For example, if we are faced with a situation we have never encountered before in our past, the dendrites and synapses within our brains will form in the uncommitted areas to allow for a change in our thinking. If on the other hand, we previously committed our minds to one way of dealing with a problem, the dendrites and synapses in those areas that were fixed, can be altered to form another way of thinking. For example, if a gang member wants to kill a rival and he is determined to do it, and he later learns that the rival was killed in a car accident, the structure of his dendrites and synapses will change and the desire to kill his rival will cease since killing the rival is academic.

By the time a young offender has reached 17, if he hasn’t been treated for his delinquency, then in all likelihood, dendrites and synapses in that part of his brain will continue to remain fixed in a manner that will result in him continuing to commit crimes as he gets older.

I should add that it is generally accepted that until a person is twenty-five years of age, he is still immature and susceptible to doing foolish things such as crimes.

The question that is facing us is; what do we do with a juvenile murderer whose brain is wired up to committing such crimes? If he isn’t executed for the purpose of protecting us in society, then we have to accept the premise that he will be with us for a great many years. If that is so, we don’t want him murdering anyone else again.

There is no question that such juveniles need treatment. The real problem is; how long must he be incarcerated before psychiatrists and psychologists can conclude that he is no longer a danger to society?

That of course will be determined on the individual and the kind of treatment he gets. They will have to decide just how deep-rooted his problem is before they can decided on the treatment that is appropriate.

If we are mindful that young minds that become fixed in the wrong way (often due to circumstances beyond their own control) and are capable of being corrected, then as hard as it is, we must learn to forgive the young murderer unless the crime is so horrific, forgiveness is too far out of our reach. For example, if a juvenile murders a family, then the seriousness of the crime merits a much longer sentence and not just for treatment alone. Here is a recent example of this. Corsican officials said that a 16-year-old boy residing in the south Corsican village of Albitreccia, confessed to shooting and killing his sleeping parents and 10-year-old twin brothers with a hunting rifle. The killings were discovered August 12, 2009 after the teen told an uncle of his killing spree. The officials say the boy described shooting all four victims in their beds.

In Canada, a young offender who commits a murder can be released from closed custody anywhere from four to seven years, depending on whether or not he is tried as a young offender or tried as an adult. I do not agree with that kind of sentencing. Years ago, a young offender murdered his family and while he was in custody, he refused any form of treatment. He was released back into society. I won’t comment on whether or not he will re-offend since there is no way of ever knowing if he does since his name is secret but the thought of a young murderer walking the streets after refusing any form of treatment is scary.

In December, 2006, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States, the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a 2007 report, there were 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at ages 13 or 14. That in my opinion, is going to the extreme in the other way