American Psychological Association Overwhelmingly Votes to Adopt Resolution Opposing Death Penalty for Adolescents Aged 18–20

The American Psychological Association (APA) has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for courts and legislators to ban the use of the death penalty against people charged with committing crimes while they were under age 21. Saying that “the same scientific and societal reasons” that led the U.S. Supreme Court to bar capital punishment for offenders younger than age 18 also “apply to the late adolescent class,” the APA, the nation’s largest professional organization of psychologists, voted 161 to 7, with 1 abstention, to formally oppose the death penalty for individuals aged 18-20.

The resolution, adopted on August 3, 2022, calls the use the death penalty by a developed society against late adolescent offenders “unreliable and morally abhorrent.” The resolution emphasizes that “the brains of 18- to 20-year-olds are continuing to develop in key brain systems related to higher-order executive functions and self-control, such as planning ahead, weighing consequences of behavior, and emotional regulation.” The brain development of late adolescents, the psychologists say “cannot be distinguished reliably from that of 17-year-olds with regard to these key brain systems.”

The APA resolution also notes that “Black youth are punished more harshly than Whites” and that “it is clear death as a penalty is not applied equally and fairly among members of the late adolescent class.”

“[E]xtraneous factors such as race, ethnicity, and gender (of both the defendant and the victim) influence the discretionary decisions of prosecutors to seek and their success in obtaining death verdicts for defendants who are members of the late adolescent class,” the resolution says. “When considered in conjunction with neuroscientific evidence of the degree of continuing development of key brain systems that remains to be accomplished in the late adolescent class, these and other status variables act to create biases and prejudices that lead to a higher probability of error by triers of fact in death penalty cases.”

Former Illinois Death-Row Prisoner Marilyn Mulero, Framed by Disgraced Chicago Detective, Exonerated After 29 Years

An Illinois woman who was sentenced to death without a trial as a result of a false confession coerced by a disgraced Chicago detective has been exonerated after 29 years.

Marilyn Mulero (pictured at a news conference following her exoneration) was exonerated on August 9, 2022 when a Cook County judge granted motions filed by State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to dismiss all charges against her and six others who were framed for murder by former Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara. Mulero is the 190th person and the third woman exonerated in the U.S. since 1973 after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.

“We no longer believe in the validity of these convictions or the credibility of the evidence of these convictions,” Foxx said.

Mulero’s exoneration brings the total number of death-row exonerations from Cook County, Illinois to 16 — more than any other U.S. county. At least 14 of those exonerations have involved official misconduct by police or prosecutors, and eight have involved false confessions. The 22 death-row exonerations in Illinois are second only to Florida’s 30 death-row exonerations.

Thirty-one wrongful convictions tied to Guevara’s misconduct have now been overturned since 2016, including that of death-row exoneree Gabriel Solache. Guevera has been accused of framing defendants of murder in more than fifty cases, beating, threatening, and coercing suspects to obtain false confessions. According to the Illinois Innocence Project, Guevara refused to provide Mulero with legal counsel and subjected her to more than 20 hours of interrogation involving threats and manipulation.

Mulero spent 28 years in prison, five of them on death row, before being released in April 2020, when Governor J.B. Pritzker commuted her sentence. At a press conference after her charges were dismissed, Mulero said, “I had to be a strong individual because I had two toddlers when I was incarcerated. I had to fight for them. I had to be strong for them.”

“There’s other women out there that are incarcerated, that are innocent, that I will keep fighting for, just like our other Guevara victims that are in there,” she said.

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