Can a teenager be responsible for mass murder?

As the trial for the Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev draws to a close, experts are debating whether the accused’s age diminishes his culpability. Together with his brother, 19-year-old Tsarnaev planned and executed the devastating Boston Bombings on April 15, 2013, which killed three civilians and injured 264 others. In a subsequent manhunt the Tsarnaev brothers killed a police officer and wounded 15 others.

Like Dzokhar’s defence lawyers, Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg acknowledges that adolescence does not entail innocence. He does, however, believe it might diminish the defendant’s guilt:

“The issue is not whether adolescent immaturity excuses criminal conduct — it doesn’t — but whether it diminishes someone’s responsibility for his actions, in much the same way that coercion or unusually strong emotions might…

“Research… has identified the neural bases of adolescents’ intensified susceptibility to peer pressure and is revealing the period to be one of heightened neuroplasticity, or capacity for the brain to change.”

Writing in the Boston Globe, Harvard law professor and former federal judge Nancy Gertner suggested that adolescent psychology and neuroscience are worthy of consideration:

“He was 19, just barely past the date at which the law acknowledges an adolescent’s immature brain. But while the law recognizes 18 as the cutoff point for the death penalty, neuroscience suggests that the period of relative brain immaturity stretches into the early 20s.”

David Hoose, death penalty lawyer and legal analyst, noted that the trial has many recent legal precedents. “This is a very hot issue in criminal justice circles these days … that young men really do not mature fully in terms of the neuroscience until they are in the mid-20s,” he said. “This is a kid who one minute is goofing around with his college buddies and the next minute is looking at jihadi movies.”

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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