The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility

ISBN-13: 9780198860020 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 256 str.

Gideon Yaffe (Professor of Law and Profe

Opis

Why be lenient towards children who commit crimes? Reflection on the grounds for such leniency is the entry point into the development, in this book, of a theory of the nature of criminal responsibility and desert of punishment for crime. Gideon Yaffe argues that child criminals are owed lesser punishments than adults thanks not to their psychological, behavioural, or neural immaturity but, instead, because they are denied the vote. This conclusion is reached through accounts of the nature of criminal culpability, desert for wrongdoing, strength of legal reasons, and what it is to have a say over the law. The centrepiece of this discussion is the theory of criminal culpability. To be criminally culpable is for one's criminal act to manifest a failure to grant sufficient weight to the legal reasons to refrain. The stronger the legal reasons, then, the greater the criminal culpability. Those who lack a say over the law, it is argued, have weaker legal reasons to refrain from crime than those who have a say. They are therefore reduced in criminal culpability and deserve lesser punishment for their crimes. Children are owed leniency, then, because of the political meaning of age rather than because of its psychological meaning. This position has implications for criminal justice policy, with respect to, among other things, the interrogation of children suspected of crimes and the enfranchisement of adult felons.

Recenzje

This book contains a mountain of novel and important insights about several of the most central questions in the philosophy of criminal law. ... I hope and predict that it will stimulate a wave of efforts to explain whether and why our criminal justice system should treat kids more leniently than adults. But even if no flood of future efforts is forthcoming, Yaffe's book stands as a valuable contribution to several of the most central and important topics in the philosophy of criminal law.

O autorze

Gideon Yaffe is Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Yale. He is the author of Attempts: In the Philosophy of Action and the Criminal Law (OUP 2010), as well as books about John Locke and Thomas Reid. He also collaborates with neuroscientists on experiments intended to be of relevance to criminal responsibility assessments.