It has been part of the role of medical organizations in Western nations to develop position statements on various sociopolitical issues. Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have established position statements related to social policy, including capital punishment. In 2001, AAPL endorsed a moratorium on capital punishment. Recent calls for AAPL to end...

Current debate on the death penalty in public and professional spheres is seen as divisive in nature, disallowing the possibility of common agreement. The history of views of the death penalty within the Catholic Church illustrates centuries of tensions and ambiguities as well as a current posture that manages to hold these tensions while advocating a strong position. That history of church vie...

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Stanford v. Kentucky, the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishments clause does not shield minors 16 or 17 years of age from the death penalty. Holding, astonishingly, that Stanford is no longer the law of the land, the Missouri Supreme Court recently reversed the death sentence of a 17-year-old murderer in Simmons v. Roper. The U.S. Suprem...

Over the past twenty years, neuroscientists have discovered that brain maturation continues through an individual’s midtwenties. The United States Supreme Court cited this research to support its abolition of the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons. Now the Court is faced with two cases that challenge the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without parole. Many...

The past decade has been marked by historic opinions regarding the culpability of juveniles by the US Supreme Court. In 2005, the death penalty was abolished, 5 years later, life without parole for crimes, other than homicide, was banned, and then just last year, mandatory life sentences for any crime was abolished. The court referenced developmental science in all these cases. In this article,...

Before the abolition of the death penalty for homicide the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 defined 18 years as the minimum age for execution, the last teenager to be hanged being "Flossie" Forsythe in 1960 at the age of 18. Prior to 1966 a murderer could "hang by the neck until dead" and due to this courts were more ready to allow a culprit to be termed "insane". Since then the number of "i...

Risk-taking is subject to considerable individual differences. In the current study, we tested whether resting-state activity in the prefrontal cortex and trait sensitivity to reward and punishment can help predict risk-taking behavior. Prefrontal activity at rest was assessed in seventy healthy volunteers using electroencephalography, and compared to their choice behavior on an economic risk-t...