in their legal proceedings. However, during the 1990s,
public concerns about youth violence rose to significant
levels and drove a series of key legislative changes that
allowed the transfer of adolescents to adult court to
become easier and more common and for juveniles tried
in juvenile court to be given harsher penalties.
Given the adultlike penalties that can now be given
to youth, courts have increasingly required that adoles-
cent defendants be competent to proceed to adjudica-
tion. At present, the specific nature of competence
standards in juvenile courts remains unsettled. Although
courts have generally required that adolescents have the
same types of legal capacities as adults, some jurisdic-
tions have held that lower levels of these capacities may
suffice for adolescents in juvenile court.
Another issue that remains undetermined pertains
to possible bases for findings of incompetence among
adolescents. Although mental disorders and mental
retardation are the most commonly recognized sources
of incompetence, some adolescents may be incompe-
tent owing to developmental immaturity rather than
mental disorders or mental retardation. However, it is
currently unclear whether jurisdictions will recognize
developmental immaturity as a legitimate basis for a
finding of incompetence.Possible Sources of Adjudicative
Incompetence in Youth
Legal deficits in youth may stem from very different
sources. One possible cause of incompetence may
be mental disorders. For instance, a young girl with a
thought disorder may have a paranoid delusion that her
attorney is conspiring against her and thus refuse to tell
her attorney critical information regarding her case, a
youth with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder may have difficulty attending to court pro-
ceedings and managing his courtroom behavior, and a
young girl with a depressive disorder may be unmoti-
vated to adequately defend herself due to feelings of
worthlessness.
A second possible cause of incompetence is mental
retardation or severe cognitive deficits. Research has
found that youth who have cognitive deficits are much
more likely than other youth to demonstrate deficits in
legal capacities relevant to adjudication. In addition to
mental disorders and cognitive deficits, however, ado-
lescents may also have impaired legal capacities simply
due to normal developmental immaturity. Evidence for
maturity-related legal deficits is provided by theMacArthur Juvenile Adjudicative Competence study. In
this important study, Thomas Grisso and his colleagues
examined the legal capacities of 927 adolescents and
466 adults from detained and community sites. Results
indicated that young adolescents were more likely to
demonstrate legal impairments than adults. Specifically,
one third of youth aged 11 to 13 and one fifth of youth
aged 14 to 15 demonstrated significant impairments in
the understanding of legal proceedings and/or legal rea-
soning. In addition, young adolescents performed in a
manner that suggested that they are less likely to recog-
nize the risks and long-term consequences of legal judg-
ments than older individuals.
While it is often assumed that experience with the
legal system will mitigate any limitations in youths’
legal capacities, this is not necessarily the case.
Considerable research has indicated that simply hav-
ing court experience does not equate to having ade-
quate legal capacities.
The high rates of legal deficits in young adolescents
may, in part, stem from the fact that youths’ cognitive
capacities may not yet have reached their adult poten-
tial. In addition, experts, including Elizabeth Scott,
Lawrence Steinberg, and colleagues, have emphasized
that psychosocial immaturity may also contribute to
age-related impairments in competence-related legal
capacities. Specifically, developmental psychology
provides evidence that adolescents are more likely than
adults to have difficulties in recognizing the conse-
quences of their decisions, are more likely to be influ-
enced by peers, and tend to act in an impulsive manner.
The research findings on youths’ legal capacities
raise a number of important issues for the legal sys-
tem. While the legal system automatically assumes
that adolescents, including young adolescents, are
competent to stand trial unless proven otherwise, the
high rate of legal impairments among young adoles-
cents questions the appropriateness of this presump-
tion. In addition, given that a high rate of young
adolescents could show limited legal capacities, there
is a considerable need for methods to assess adoles-
cents who may be incompetent to proceed to adjudi-
cation and for strategies to remediate youths who are
found incompetent.Assessment of Youths’
Adjudicative Competence
When an attorney or judge has concerns about a par-
ticular youth’s adjudicative competence, the court willAdjudicative Competence of Youth——— 3A-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:41 PM Page 3