Supreme Court justices want to punish juveniles that commit heinous crimes with mandatory life sentences. Something that plays into all this is the eighth amendment stating that there shall be no cruel or unusual punishments for crimes. This raises the question of whether or not we should allow juveniles to receive life sentences no matter what their crime is but no matter what we think or try kids are still going to commit crimes. However, the judicial system can still treat them like children by keeping the current ruling that does not allow mandatory life sentences for juveniles who commit heinous crimes. No matter how we view the facts one thing is for sure which is that juveniles are still developing and are different from adults, …show more content…
Fundamentally all these kids just want to play and hang out with friends whether it be playing video games or playing with their toy trains and cars. Mr. Garinger that “they are less mature, more vulnerable to peer pressure, cannot escape from dangerous environments, and their characters are still in formation” (Garinger 1). In other words kids are extremely immature, susceptible and malleable. Garinger is trying to say that these kids are still young and immature, they are still growing up and learning right from wrong which is also subjective depending on the parents and culture in which the child grows up in. It is fairly perplexing to think that for the people under eighteen are treated like children for the fact that they “[can not] smoke, or drink, or go to R movies without our OK... they [do not] vote... they have curfews…. [and we] we fret over their Internet access and fuss about driving privileges”, yet some people still want to treat these children as adults for one act that they made (Lundstrom 1). If we want to treat them like children for everything we might as well treat them like children when it comes to trying them for their crimes. The bottom line is that these are kids not adults thus we cannot hold them to the same