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Juvenile correctional proceedings liability age is 13. Juvenile educational and therapeutic proceedings liability applies to all persons under the age of 18 (including persons below 13 years of age). [96] The maximum possible sentence that can be imposed on offenders taking criminal liability under 18 years of age is 25 years' imprisonment.
The States, not the federal courts, make those broad moral and policy judgments in the first instance when enacting their sentencing laws. And state sentencing judges and juries then determine the proper sentence in individual cases in light of the facts and circumstances of the offense, and the background of the offender."
In criminal law, culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his ...
The Court's "independent judgement" concluding that the death penalty was an unconstitutionally disproportionate punishment for juveniles as a class relied on psychological and sociological studies to establish the diminished culpability of juveniles. [26] Justice Kennedy makes three points explaining why juveniles are less culpable than adults ...
In law, there is a known exception to the assumption that moral culpability lies in either individual character or freely willed acts. The insanity defense – or its corollary, diminished responsibility (a sort of appeal to the fallacy of the single cause) – can be used to argue that the guilty deed was not the product of a guilty mind. [17]
Few juveniles have ever been executed for their crimes. Even when juveniles were sentenced to death, few executions were actually carried out. In the United States for example, youths under the age of 18 were executed at a rate of 20–27 per decade, or about 1.6–2.3% of all executions from 1880s to the 1920s.
Juveniles also have special protections, in addition to juvenile courts, which are closed to the public in the US. In France, closing the court to the public ( huis clos ) is an option. Just like in France, US parents or guardians have to be informed and to be present during the police questioning.
In return, the juvenile surrenders certain constitutional rights, such as a right to trial by jury, the right to cross-examine, and even the right to a speedy trial. Notable writings by reformers such as Jerome G. Miller [21] show that very few juvenile delinquents actually broke any law. Most were simply rounded up by the police after some ...