When 15-year-old Luis Cruz joined the Latin Kings in 1991, he was a child by almost any measure: He couldn’t legally drive, drop out of school or buy a beer. But was he still a child a few years later when — just months after he turned 18 — he murdered two people on the orders of gang leaders?
Earlier this year, a federal judge in Connecticut said yes. The judge decided that a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that forbade mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles should apply to 18-year-olds like Cruz, and granted his request to be resentenced. It’s one of a small but growing number of cases in which courts are grappling with what to do with young adults who commit the most serious crimes.
The years between 18 and 21 are a sort of societal limbo period when, in most states, you can smoke but not drink, make medical decisions for yourself but stay on your parents’ health insurance policy and try on a variety of identities and life experiences without anyone looking askance.
[For more on this story by Beth Schwartzapfel, go to https://jjie.org/2018/08/27/de...-input-from-science/]
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