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

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