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May 17, 2010, US Supreme Court, Graham v Florida, eji.org
US Supreme Court found that 17 year old minds don’t have judgment abilities of adult minds so can’t be sentenced to life without parole as an adult might for the same crime:
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Justice Kennedy for the majority: “The juvenile should not be deprived of the opportunity to achieve maturity of judgment and self-recognition of human worth and potential.”
………………….. Added: “The U.S. Supreme Court discussed adolescent brain science during oral arguments in Roper v. Simmons, which abolished the juvenile death penalty, and cited the field in its 2010 decision in Graham v. Florida, which prohibited sentencing juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide to life without parole.”
Spring 2012, “Should the Science of Adolescent Brain Development Inform Public Policy?“ issues.org, by Laurence Steinberg
subhead, “…
“There is another kind of asynchrony in brain development during adolescence that is important for public policy. Middle adolescence is a period during which brain systems implicated in how a person responds to rewards are at their height of arousability but systems important for self-regulation are still immature. The different timetables followed by these different brain systems create a vulnerability to risky and reckless behavior that is greater in middle adolescence than before or after. It’s as if the brain’s accelerator is pressed to the floor before a good braking system is in place. Given this, it’s no surprise that the commission of crime peaks around age 17—as does first experimentation with alcohol and marijuana, automobile crashes, accidental drownings, and attempted suicide.
In sum, the consensus to emerge from recent research on the adolescent brain is that teenagers are not as mature in either brain structure or function as adults.This does not mean that adolescents’ brains are “defective,” just as no one would say that newborns’ muscular systems are defective because they are not capable of walking or their language systems are defective because they can’t yet carry on conversations. The fact that the adolescent brain is still developing, and in this regard is less mature than the adult brain, is normative, not pathological. Adolescence is a developmental stage, not a disease, mental illness, or defect. But it is a time when people are, on average, not as mature as they will be when they become adults.”…
[article begins]: “The science of adolescent brain development is making its way into the national conversation. As an early researcher in the field, I regularly receive calls from journalists asking how the science of adolescent brain development should affect the way society treats teenagers. I have been asked whether this science justifies raising the driving age, outlawing the solitary confinement of incarcerated juveniles, excluding 18-year-olds from the military, or prohibiting 16-year-olds from serving as lifeguards on the Jersey Shore. Explicit reference to the neuroscience of adolescence is slowly creeping into legal and policy discussions as well as popular culture. The U.S. Supreme Court discussed adolescent brain science during oral arguments in Roper v. Simmons, which abolished the juvenile death penalty, and cited the field in its 2010 decision in Graham v. Florida,which prohibited sentencing juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide to life without parole.
There is now incontrovertible evidence that adolescence is a period of significant changes in brain structure and function. Although most of this work has appeared just in the past 15 years, there is already strong consensus among developmental neuroscientists about the nature of this change. And the most important conclusion to emerge from recent research is that important changes in brain anatomy and activity take place far longer into development than had been previously thought. Reasonable people may disagree about what these findings may mean as society decides how to treat young people, but there is little room for disagreement about the fact that adolescence is a period of substantial brain maturation with respect to both structure and function.”…
Added: NPR: Teen brains lack chemical connections of adult brains
3/1/2010, “The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet,“ NPR.org, Richard Knox
“Nature made the brains of children and adolescents excitable. Their brain chemistry is tuned to be responsive to everything in their environment. After all, that’s what makes kids learn so easily…. [Frances] Jensen [pediatric neurologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston] says scientists used to think human brain development was pretty complete by age 10. Or as she puts it, that “a teenage brain is just an adult brain with fewer miles on it.”
But it’s not. To begin with, she says, a crucial part of the brain — the frontal lobes — are not fully connected….
“It’s the part of the brain that says: ‘Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?’” Jensen says. “It’s not that they don’t have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they’re going to access it more slowly.”
That’s because the nerve cells that connect teenagers’ frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish. Teenagers don’t have as much of the fatty coating called myelin, or “white matter,” that adults have in this area.
Think of it as insulation on an electrical wire. Nerves need myelin for nerve signals to flow freely. Spotty or thin myelin leads to inefficient communication between one part of the brain and another.”…(graph above via npr)
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Added: “It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet.“
“Understanding the Teen Brain,“ University of Rochester Medical Center, Sather, Rita, RN, Shelat, Amit, MD [undated]
“It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet.
The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so. In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
In teen’s brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not necessarily at the same rate. That’s why when teens experience overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.”
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Added: How many teen “climate protesters” know a fraction of the extent of US “global climate” funding that has been mandated since 1990--long before they were born?
Virtually unknown massive US taxpayer funding of “climate action” mandated since 1990: Since US elites lavishly fund Islamic terrorists, stealing from US taxpayers and pretending they haven’t been is peanuts: Beginning in 1990 US political class mandated that US taxpayers fund the global climate industry in perpetuity. "Climate action” via US taxpayer dollars exploded in 1990 and has continued (This chart, page 4, pdf, is an underestimate, doesn’t include congressional appropriations).
“Note and Sources: The data shown here are funding disbursements by the White House U.S. Global Change Research Program and its predecessor, the National Climate Program, available at NCP 1988, 43; Climate Science Watch 2007; and Leggett, Lattanzio, and Bruner 2013. These data, however, do not represent congressional climate science funding appropriations to other government agencies. As we show later in a more detailed assessment of U.S. government climate science funding, the numbers here, especially those for more recent years, greatly underestimate the actual level of funding.” pdf p. 4
Fall 2015, “Causes and Consequences of the Climate Science Boom,“ independent.org, Butos and McQuade
“Government policies and funding as well as the emergence of a scientific “Big Player” [UN IPCC] that has aggressively championed the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)1, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have together fomented a boom in climate science that began in the early 1990s and has grown markedly over the past decade.”…
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Image of Bush #1, “New World Order quotes” via You Tube
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