I'm personally as disgusted by that block quote as I was reading the article. I don't care if the kid wore a Barney costume under a diaper every day…

Putting solid limits on the age of maturity is no more easy and no more difficult than putting limits on other defintions.When does red stop being red and becomes pink?

What is the exact line between a debilitating neurosis and a psychosis? Because classifying is difficult, doesn't mean that trying to do so is an invalid exercise.
Classificaions are guidelines, and those on the border lines have to be shoved into one category or another for expediency. Otherwise, form birth to death, we could talk only about people, without distinguishing between an 8 mo. old and an 88 year old.

Since I don't accept punishment as vengeance but simply think of it as reaffiramtion of the rule of law, i think questions about maturity and mental stability are extremely important, no matter how difficult it may be to establish the exact rules.
When does justice stop being justice and becomes retribution, instead?
i have no fixed answer, but I think it's important to ask the question.

Luckily, not everyone seees it in such barbarically simplistic terms. We do have different categories of murder, for example: manslaugter, 1st degree, and so on.
Drawing the line there is as difficult and contentious as deciding the fate of a 14 year old boy.

While we view something like honor killings with horror, the punishment fits the crime according to the mores of some cultures. Likewise, other cultures view our fondness for harsh sentencing of minors and, especially, the death penalty at any age, with equal repugance.

We are talking about cultural mores, and those change, usually when new insights are allowed to penetrate the barriers of tradition.. For some reason, US culture remains more rigid than most other western cultures and clings to its views long after their value has been demonstrated to be counterproductive elsewhere.

I'm particularly troubled by the 'personal responsibily' argument. Though very valid and valuable, it's become a cliche used to shield a multitude of personal opinions and biases on particular issues.

One question to examine: what is society's responsibility towards its members?
Is it not society's responsibilty to intervene when someone is being abused or mistreated, for example? When it is known that a neighbor's child is being abused, should we simply say it's the responsibility of the parents and none of society's business ?
On all such topics, there are no easy, black and white answers,. They are topics that should be examined, not something to be dimissed with easy slogans. In fact, the minute I see an argument set forth so rigidly, i know that I'm dealing with a case of simply opting for whatever feels good, without thinking about it in full.

The fate of the 14 year old says as much about our own responsbility as it dies about the boy's.

Don't be an ass SD. Of course those who commit crimes should be held responsible. How does that statement apply to a child being held to the standards of an adult?

Your attitude on this issue remind me of the “Funny” Story about a 54 year old white lady from rural Kansas who's husband died of natural causes..

The DA knew and disliked her so much that he wanted to prosecute her for the murder of her husband but, due to the facts, had no chance for conviction… “No Chance” that is until he charged her as a 19 year old black man from the inner city…

Needless to say he handily won the case. *

*** After thought ***

* You know how “ALL“ those people in Kansas are… Just like “ALL“ those damn progressives and liberals… Easy to put in a box and categorize! (/snark)

Unfortunately, the general direction of modern “liberalism” (a concept which owes nothing to Burke or John Stuart Mill) is to pass rights out not only to “psychosocial adults” but to children (younger and older than 18), and convicted felons (hence George Soros' Open Society Initiative's ongoing multinational initiatives to extend the vote to teenagers and those who are serving prison sentences for felonies).

Our judicial system serves not only to dispense justice but (through the concept of “civil death” – denial of the vote, the right to associate freely with others, the right to keep and bear arms to felons, and to contest divorces) it also effectively determines psychosocial age by depriving people who fail the test for psychosocial maturity as our society has defined it – by not committing felonies. This test is continually being adjusted for fairness by the courts and by our lawmakers; it is as fair as we as a society can make it.

Presumptively, we have agreed (through our elected representatives and our courts) that at the age of eighteen, you accept the full range of rights and responsibilities of a citizen in our republic. If, in trying to be fair to those who don't measure up on “psychosocial tests” which may or may not measure civil maturity with accuracy (and metrics such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory fail more often than they succeed in measuring maturity and social competence), we deny the full range of civil rights to an individual, we would be criticized, and justly so, for violating that person's civil rights.

Using physical age as a provisional determinant of social maturity may not be perfectly fair, but it is the fairest yardstick we can apply – the social scientists haven't had better luck than the lawmakers and judges at determining when someone is fully capable of making adult decisions. It's one of the reasons that our lawmakers have periodic fits of hyperactivity where they deny the entire citizen class full civil rights to try to prevent those among us who are socially immature from hurting the rest of us (gun control, codes of conduct in institutions such as universities which regulate speech, sex and other social behavior, absurdities such as the Oxley-Sarbanes Act – an attempt to shield investors from the consequences of being idiots – and McCain-Feingold, an attempt to restrict how campaigns are paid for which has had the effect (unintended?) of placing vast political power in the hands of foreigners like George Soros and Barack Obama's other benefactors from overseas.

We MUST either place solid limits on maturity, train our children while we have them in school how to be mature citizens, or we must ALL accept being placed in the position of being wards of the state because some of us might resent being treated as children when we fail to respect the rights of others.

By the way, how much maturity does it take to accept the proposition “thou shalt do no murder?” which has been accepted by most major religions AND most secular societies? You don't have to be eighteen, or even fifteen, to understand that one. Kill someone and pay with your own liberty, even your life. Nothing hard about that one.

If the legal arguments these people are putting forward are accepted, then we must accept the fact that no one is safe from people younger than… what's the age at which murder becomes a felony?

Doesn't that mean that a good number of adults don´t score as adults on the test even when WELL past the legal age? If Clarissa is reading this and can correct me if I´m wrong I´d much appreciate it. As it stands this data would appear to indicate that you can´t even try ADULTS as a adults a good number of the time, if you´re going by that test. So either there are a lot of grown children in the world that in fairness should be tried as juveniles OR the test is too rigid and does not reflect an adult mindset well, seeing as only half of adults pass it themselves.

This as always goes back to the issue of trying to put solid limits on maturity, a concept that is anything but solid across age groups. I think most people would agree that sentencing an 18 year old to life for capital murder, but sentencing a 17 year and 364 day year old to a drastically lower sentence as a “juvenile” is absurd, but as the age lowers the limit becomes harder to guess. I think that psychological tests would be in order under a certain age (but which?). Of course, that means that you have to be ready to put an 11 year old in jail for life, if he or she actually turns out to have an adult mentality. Or release a 25 year old, if they don´t. Our intuition feels both are unfair, and quite frankly I have no idea what the answer is.