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U.S. Supreme Court · 1982
455 U.S. 104 (1982)
Held that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments bar a capital sentencer from refusing, as a matter of law, to consider relevant mitigating evidence of a youthful defendant's character and background. Applying Lockett v. Ohio, the Court ruled that the sentencer may weigh such evidence but "may not give it no weight by excluding such evidence from their consideration": "just as the chronological age of a minor is itself a relevant mitigating factor of great weight, so must the background and mental and emotional development of a youthful defendant be duly considered in sentencing." The Court did not decide whether the Eighth Amendment forbids executing an offender who was 16 at the time of the crime.
Some later courts have distinguished or questioned it — read before relying.
Treatment last confirmed July 18, 2026. Case-wide subsequent treatment; human-set. Not specific to any one passage.
At the population level, childhood adversity — adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, and a harmful family or home environment — is associated with an elevated risk of adolescent antisocial and delinquent conduct, in a graded, dose-response pattern (more cumulative adversity, higher average risk).
Youth in the juvenile justice system carry a far higher burden of trauma exposure and trauma-related psychiatric disorder than adolescents in the community: roughly nine in ten detained youth report traumatic exposure — typically multiple, beginning early in childhood — and PTSD prevalence (about 9–24%, higher in girls) is several times community rates.
Justice-involved youth carry a markedly elevated burden of traumatic brain injury: roughly 30% of juvenile offenders report a prior TBI — more than three times the odds of comparison youth — with prevalence in custodial samples ranging from about 17% to over 70% depending on definition and method, and TBI histories clustering with mental-health, substance-use, and behavioral problems that bear on culpability assessment, screening, and rehabilitation.
Adolescent personality and character are still forming and are not reliable indicators of fixed adult character; most adolescents who engage in antisocial behavior, including serious offending, desist as they mature, so adolescent conduct is a poor predictor of irretrievable depravity.