That's taking 'Not in My Backyard' to a whole 'nother leftist level.

We need to get tougher on juvenile crime. Right now, you have to be 18 to be eligible for the death penalty. If we lowered the death penalty eligibility age to 13, we wouldn't be having all these school shootings.

China uses the death penalty much more frequently than the United States and crime is much lower there.

Toss their young buts into the juvenile holding system and then DO NOT expunge their record for violent crime when they turn 18. What's on your juvenile record stays there into adulthood. This at least gives employers all of the information they should have in order to make informed hiring decisions.

The Political Left gradually softened up the 'justice' system to the point that it's become an ineffective joke where society is concerned. Tightening up judiciously allows time for gradual changes that people can adapt to rather than radical changes that shock society and culture. The softening process happened gradually over the course of decades and the tightening up process needs to take at least five or so years of a tweaking process so as to be acceptable to the nation.

I like your idea about not sealing records when the offenders turn 18. That can be done because the records aren't destroyed, they're just concealed, and law enforcement can still access them.

But what did you think of my idea about lowering the age of death penalty eligibility?

It's a gray area since biologically it's arguable that under a certain age almost all children are some form of sociopath. It takes time for the brain to fully mature. I would be willing to go as low as fifteen on the death penalty in regards to truly heinous crimes.

On the other hand perhaps in such cases we could STOP automatically releasing them at 18 and just keep them locked up until at least into their middle twenties. (Shrug) but this isn't set in stone with me; and I am persuadable.

Thank you for your input. One of the reasons the system has gotten so soft on juvenile crime is because of the belief that no human brain's frontal lobe is fully developed before age 25. I don't believe that is true. And here are my reasons why:

1. The scan used to determine whether certain regions of the brain are fully developed is a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan. There are eight billion people on this planet, and only 100 million to 150 million people get MRI scans each year. That's less than two percent of the global population. So I don't think we know as much about the brain as we think we do.
2. Educational psychologist Jane M. Healy, who has written several excellent books including "Endangered Minds" and "Failure To Connect", says that human brains are physically shaped by experience. So the more frequently you use a certain region of the brain, the faster it matures. That means it's possible for some human brains to have fully developed frontal lobes before turning 25, and it's also possible for some human brains not to have fully developed frontal lobes until many years past age 25-if ever.

Based on these two facts, I believe there are people under age 25 with fully developed frontal lobes, and I believe these need to be found and studied so we can understand why their frontal lobes developed ahead of schedule.

One last thing. Only murderers should get the death penalty. There are several people in past centuries who were executed even though they never took any lives, such as Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Lady Jane Grey, and Thomas More.

Great information. Thanks!

Back during the 1990s I used to advocate for everyone with a death sentence simply be shipped to a deserted island in the Pacific ocean and get dropped off with survival supplies to make it -- or not -- on their own.

Meanwhile the U.S. Navy -- which is always training anyway -- would always be patrolling in the area to intercept any attempts to free the -- from leftist perspectives -- poor, mistreated, and misunderstood murderers. Meh . . . the older I get, the more I favor this approach.