The debate
surrounding treating juveniles as adults in certain cases in criminal law—be it
indictment as an adult or being sent to an adult prison—misses the fundamental
injustice of the thing: juveniles should not be treated as adults anymore than
adults should be treated as juveniles.
Although
the common law is less emphatic than the civil law on this point, physical
persons are classified into different legal categories. Two such categories are
minor (juvenile) and adult (major). With each of these categories come certain
duties and corresponding rights. It is therefore unjust to attribute to a minor
certain duties juridically attributable to an adult or to deprive him of
certain rights juridically deprived of an adult.
With every
duty comes a right. Hence with the duty to follow the law and submit to
adult punishment for its breach comes the right to vote, an active voice in
society and a corresponding duty to behave for its good. But the minor does not
have this right, nor a host of other rights, and therefore does not have the
same obligation under the law to submit to the same degree of punishment. To
impose a duty without granting a corresponding right is a contravention of
justice.
Further,
if a juvenile is capable of committing the same heinous crimes that an adult is
capable of, and therefore has the same degree of rationality for the purposes
of law, then the deprivation of suffrage to juveniles is thereby unjustifiable.
The degree of one’s rationality under the law is an all-or-nothing category; adults
are presumed to have greater rationality and are therefore accorded greater
duties and rights, while juveniles and the mentally retarded are
correspondingly accorded fewer duties and rights due to their diminished
rational faculties.
It is
patently unjust to categorize a person as an adult for the purposes of duty but
as a juvenile for the purposes of right. A person is a person; he is either an
adult or a juvenile. Justice does not recognize personal duality. Neither
should law.
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