By appearance, children/minors are much more inferior to those that are older than them. So therefore consciously, children should never be tried as adults seeing as though they don't truly hold the mental capacity to understand the crimes that they may have committed. Certain age ranges of children determine their neurological stages. Some are unable to determine what's truly right and wrong, and are somewhat naive to the fact that they are unaware of that.
For example, crimes that occurred in the years prior to the 1900s were cases of children facing the death penalty. Holding children accountable for actions they essentially have no control over is deemed to be ridiculous in a psychological sense. Unfortunately its taken many cases similar to this to realize that the brain of younger individuals are still developing. This turn of events, and further research finally caused for the death penalty to be abolished in the 80s.
While the idea of bestowing the death penalty on a child is appalling in every way, you also have to remember what we talked about in class in respects to how conscious children are of their crimes based on their age. Realizing that children from ages 0 - 6, 6 - 12, and 12 - 17 have respectively different cognitive capacity plays a huge part in juvenile crime deference.
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