States rethink 'adult time for adult crime' - the Youth Advocacy Division

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Pennsylvania man who was facing the death penalty for crimes committed as a juvenile. I happened to have reviewed this literature for a manuscript reporting our own data from longitudinal studies performed by Penn’s Brain Behavior Laboratory and the Schizophrenia Center, and so I agreed to augment it and make it more readable for nonexperts. He sent it back to me, this time formatted as an affidavit in the case of a Mr. Hector Huertas. He asked whether I would mind reviewing the affidavit and, if I agreed with its contents, to notarize and sign it. Well, I agreed and it apparently worked. The Commonwealth decided not to pursue the death penalty in light of scientific findings that the brain does not mature until early adulthood. Soon afterward Mr. Bookman called again, this time to help a colleague in Texas who was defending a Mr. Toronto Patterson, a death-row inmate who also committed his crime when he was an adolescent. The affidavit did not save Mr. Patterson’s life, but while the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, it expressed interest in the scientific evidence from brain research that was presented in the case, and invited such arguments in future cases. The race was on to see what would be the test case determining whether the death penalty will apply to juvenile defendants, and I found myself being asked to sign affidavits from around the country. The “winner” was a Missouri man, Mr. Christopher Simmons (Roper v. Simmons). Below is a summary of the material I have submitted as part of an amicus organized by Mr. Simmons’ defense: The rate at which the human brain matures has been of considerable interest to neuroscientists, and knowledge of when different brain regions mature in human development may have profound implications for understanding behavioral development. Although the brain and its structure become well differentiated during fetal development, there is overwhelming evidence that much of the maturational process occurs after birth. Indeed, projections from early pioneering work on donated brain tissue have indicated that some brain regions do not reach maturity in humans until adulthood. These projections have been confirmed by more recent neuroimaging studies. While sophisticated methods for preservation and dissection of postmortem brain tissue had been developed in the first decades of the 20th century, it was not until the 1960s that enough such tissue was available to examine the question of brain maturation in humans. Arguably the largest collection and the most influential work was that of Dr. Paul I. Yakovlev and his colleagues at Harvard University. His work has focused on the creation of myelin, fatty tissue surrounding nerve fibers. This process, known as myelogenesis, is important for assuring efficient transmission of neuronal signals; myelin surrounds the nerve fibers that carry information across large distances very much in the same way that rubber is used for insulating cables designed to conduct electricity across distance. Yakovlev examined slices of brain tissue from a wide age range of more than 200 brains, finding that especially late to myelinate were those parts of the brain that inhibit and modulate the more primitive, drive-related activation of the limbic areas. As interpreted by Yakovlev and his colleagues, the anatomic data indicated that the very functions that
make us uniquely human are the latest to become fully integrated into the workings of the developing brain. University of Chicago researcher Peter Huttenlocher uncovered another neurodevelopmental phenomenon apparently taking place during adolescence: pruning. According to the pruning hypothesis, neurons and their connections that have not been consistently used during childhood “shrivel off” and are eliminated at some point during adolescence, thereby allowing for greater efficiency of the remaining neural systems. Postmortem tissue studies have contributed important insights into understanding brain maturation, but they have serious limitations, including tissue availability and the inability to trace developmental changes in the same individual. These difficulties are circumvented by a set of novel techniques—developed in the 1970s and fully implemented by the 1990s—that can be generally referred to as structural imaging. These methods permit visualization and volumetric measurement of brain structure in living people without any risk to the subjects. The method that has become state-of-the-art for these studies is based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedures. MRI has provided data on the composition of three brain components, or compartments: gray matter—nerve tissue responsible for information processing; white matter—nerve tissue responsible for information transmission; and cerebrospinal fluid. This division of the brain into these compartments is termed segmentation. In one of the first studies examining segmented MRI in children and adults, researchers Terry Jernigan and Paula Tallal from the University of California have documented the pruning process. They found that children had higher volumes of gray matter than adults, indicating loss of gray matter during adolescence. In another study Stanford researchers Adolph Pfefferbaum and Calvin Lim demonstrated a clearly different developmental course for gray matter and white matter: The former declined steadily during adolescence while the latter increased in volume until about 20-22 years of age. A subsequent NIH study led by Judith Rappoport pinpointed the greatest delay in myelination for the brain’s fronto-temporal pathways. In the only study to date that examined segmented MRI volumes from a prospective sample of 28 healthy children aged one month to 10 years, as well as a small adult sample, researchers from Penn and Toyama University in Japan applied segmentation procedures developed by the Penn group. This, actually, was the very study that prompted me to write a review of the literature, which I used for Mr. Bookman’s request. We found that while gray matter volume peaked at about two years of age, the volume of white matter, which indicates brain maturation, continued to increase into adulthood. Furthermore, we found that the frontal lobe showed the greatest maturational lag and its myelination is unlikely to be completed before young adulthood. Most recently, investigators at UCLA’s brain imaging center analyzed MRI scans of 13 healthy children over a period of eight to 10 years. They concluded that brain areas in
Page 1 and 2: States rethink 'adult time for adul
Page 3 and 4: "When you teach someone to swim, yo
Page 5 and 6: New York Times March 11, 2007 The B
Page 7 and 8: mind-reading device will threaten o
Page 9 and 10: Marois explained that he and Jones
Page 11 and 12: impulses and should not be held ful
Page 13 and 14: M’Naughten case in 1843, involvin
Page 15 and 16: Morse is not convinced that the Lib
Page 17 and 18: their brains scanned, neuroscience
Page 19 and 20: you have a biased reaction to a pho
Page 21 and 22: concentration camp or Guantánamo,
Page 23 and 24: astonishing our machines may become
Page 25 and 26: Brain science offers insight to tee
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Page 29: Brain Maturation and the Execution
Page 33 and 34: New research shows stark difference
Page 35 and 36: New research shows stark difference
Page 37 and 38: What Makes Teens Tick; A flood of h
Page 45 and 46: Teen Brains on Trial: Science News

States rethink 'adult time for adult crime' - the Youth Advocacy Division

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