“Rethinking Children, Crime and Culpability”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Cara Drinan. Here is its abstract:

In the early twenty-first century, the United States Supreme Court developed a rich body of case law that recognized the constitutionally significant differences between children and adults.  The core of this case law, often referred to as the Miller trilogy, banned capital punishment for juvenile crimes and significantly limited instances when states can impose life without parole on minors.  By leveraging the logic and science of the Miller trilogy, lower courts and state actors have implemented juvenile justice reforms on issues ranging from legal representation and transfer laws to conditions of confinement and parole practices.  This Article makes a novel and important argument that flows from the Miller trilogy but that has been under-theorized to date.  Specifically, in this Paper I argue that all of the ways in which children are different according to the Court — their immaturity, their impulsivity and their inability to remove themselves from criminogenic environments — are relevant to a criminal conviction just as much as they are relevant to punishment. 

The Paper proceeds in four Parts.  Part I discusses Miller’s legacy and its already vast implications nationwide. Parts II and III are the heart of the Paper, where I set forth my central claim: that Miller’s legacy demands nothing short of a wholesale reconsideration of substantive criminal law as applied to children.  Part II articulates the first principles of this theory in the context of the state’s burden to prove the elements of a crime, while Part III theorizes how defendants may leverage the defining features of youth when mounting affirmative defenses.  Part IV addresses likely conceptual and implementation-related concerns, and by way of Conclusion, I suggest that rethinking children’s culpability, rather than tinkering with their sentences, may be the most important and lasting legacy of the Miller trilogy.