The aim of this paper is to analyze the issue of juvenile offenders’ criminal culpability in relation to the discoveries of cognitive neuroscience regarding the development of brain areas involved in the decision making processes. Criminal law is based on the assumption of the possibility of reasonable self-determination of the perpetrator of a prohibited act, i.e. the freedom of a person to decide on a specific behaviour and the possibility of its execution in the outside world conditioned by, among other things, reaching a certain level of social maturity. Meeting these conditions allows the perpetrator to be accused of committing a crime. Recent research into the development of brain areas responsible for agent decision-making process shows that the maturity of these areas, perceived as a prerequisite for reaching social maturity, is achieved later in life than previously thought. These results are more and more widely incorporated into the law-making process on juvenile offenders, including being invoked as an argument for raising the threshold age for incurring criminal liability for at least some crimes. The paper presents the most important assumptions and conclusions from the aforementioned research, as well as analyzes the postulated and already adopted regulations based on them in various legal systems. 

Krystyna Mokrzycka is a PhD candidate in legal sciences within the interdisciplinary international doctoral programme Society of the Future at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). Alongside a Master in law, she also holds a BA degree in cognitive science and a Master’s degree in philosophy. She is preparing her doctoral thesis entitled Culpability of Juvenile Offenders: The Neurocognitive Perspective under the supervision of Prof. Wojciech Załuski. She also collaborates with the Future Law Lab at the Jagiellonian University.