When Is an Adolescent an Adult? Grown-Ups Seem Confused

Friday, Apr 18, 2008 - 12:30 AM

By A. BARTON HINKLE

TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST

What is an adult?

The question seems to confound many people -- social conservatives in particular, but liberals as well.

The other day prosecutors in Albemarle asked to try one of the suspects in the recent shootings on I-64 as an adult. The 16-year-old is accused of joining Slade Allen Woodson, 19, in a shooting episode that closed the highway for several hours. Judge Susan L. Whitlock has postponed until next week a hearing on the request to try the 16-year-old in adult court.

Many tough-on-crime types favor trying juveniles in adult court when they commit particularly heinous crimes, or have long records, or happen to be black.

And there haven't been too many protests from the political right about Omar Khadr, a young man -- by now -- being held as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay. Khadr, a Cana dian national, lived in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a boy. When he was 10 his father purportedly took him to meet leaders of al-Qaida, from whom he received military training. In 2002, when Khadr was 15, American forces descended on a compound near Khost, Afghanistan. In the ensuing firefight Khadr is said to have thrown a hand grenade that killed Army Sgt. Christopher Speer. Khadr was shot three times and left nearly blind in one eye. He is now in his sixth year of imprisonment, and has yet to have been found guilty at trial.

YET WHEN young people are the victims of crime we tend to view them quite differently. Last year Virginia's General Assembly passed the "Chip Alert" bill, named after slain Midlothian teenager Allen "Chip" Ellis, who was abducted and murdered the year before. Ellis was a senior in high school at the time -- but because he was 18, no Amber Alert was issued when he was determined to be missing. Amber Alerts (named for 9-year-old victim Amber Hagerman) are issued so that local media can spread the word quickly that a child is missing; time is of the essence in such cases.

Amber Alerts usually apply only to minors, but the Chip Alert bill makes sense because Ellis, despite his age, was for all intents and purposes still a minor.

Social conservatives also tend to view adolescents as dependent children when another subject comes up: abortion. Social conservatives say girls should not be able to have an abortion without at least informing, and perhaps obtaining the consent of, their parents. Those policies, say conservatives, are necessary to preserve the parents' right to determine the best medical interests of their children; young women who find themselves in a delicate way are apt to be scared, confused, and in need of the loving guidance of the people who care the most about them. They are not, say conservatives, emotionally or psychologically ready to make such a grave decision on their own.

In Texas, where officials recently raided the compound of a polygamous religious sect, girls under 16 cannot marry even with parental approval -- only a court order can allow such a union. But Texas law allows juveniles as young as 14 to be tried as adults in a felony cases.

LIBERALS, not surprisingly, embrace the same seeming contradiction in reverse: They tend to support an adolescent's right to obtain contraception or abortion without parental interference or even parental knowledge -- but tend to view adolescents as too immature to be responsible for their own actions when they commit crimes.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia singled out precisely that contradiction in a dissent two years ago in Roper v. Simmons, a case concerning the juvenile death penalty: "The American Psychological Association," he noted, "which claims in this case that scientific evidence shows persons under 18 lack the ability to take moral responsibility for their decisions, has previously taken precisely the opposite position before this very Court. In its brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota . . . the APA found 'a rich body of research' showing that juveniles are mature enough to decide whether to obtain an abortion without parental involvement."

Which is it?

Real life is fuzzier than the law can recognize. Recent research has shown that the part of the brain involved in higher-order decision-making does not fully mature until age 25 -- and yet some young teenagers show more maturity than many 30-somethings (or, for that matter, many 60-somethings). The law has to draw a bright line somewhere. But it would be nice if society -- which permits young men and women to go off to war years before it will let them drink a beer -- would make up its mind.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.