The polarized reaction to the Dharun Ravi cyberbullying case — he’s typically characterized as either a prankster or a murderer — is symptomatic of a general public confusion about how to respond to youthful offenders.
On the one hand, the capacity of youthful offenders to do grievous harm has grown with their ready access to the internet, to weapons and to toxic substances. The sometimes horrific consequences of youthful offenses provoke understandable public outrage.
On the other hand, a growing body of scientific understanding suggests that treating youthful offenders as indistinguishable from adults results in manifest injustice. As the Ravi sentencing made painfully clear, youthful offending compels us to grapple with questions of culpability, morality and proportionality that are quite different from those at work when the perpetrator is a much older adult.
At the heart of the Ravi sentencing was this question: At what age, and under what circumstances, do we deem young people sufficiently adult-like to impose adult-like sentences upon them when they offend? Our culture provides no clear answer.
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