Yet adolescence is also a time when the brain is still forming, when judgment and impulse control are not fully developed. That does not erase responsibility, but it complicates the idea of permanent moral exile. A sentence that effectively ends a young life in prison risks saying that change is impossible, that growth is irrelevant. True justice has to hold both realities at once: honoring victims’ suffering while refusing to define a teenager forever by the worst thing they have done.