Race and Judging Juvenile Offenders

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to ban life imprisonment without parole for young homicide offenders. This decision comes as social scientists and others debate how juvenile offenders should be judged relative to adult offenders. A recent study by Jennifer Eberhardt and Aneeta Rattan of Stanford University in PLoS ONE, for example, examined the effects of race on how people judge juvenile defendants, showing that merely bringing to mind a black versus white young offender can cause people to judge juveniles more harshly.