mr. stevenson would say under 14. the lawyers for arkansas and alabama said, well, maybe 12. >> ifill: is the argument that younger children or younger teenagers shouldn't be held as accountable as older ones? >> mr. stevenson would say based on the cours earlier decisions in this area that the deficits juveniles have in judgment and maturity are not crime-specific. it doesn't matter if it's murder or a non-murder crime. those characteristics apply to all juveniles under the age of 18. he said you cannot equate kids with adults. >> ifill: we're talking once again about justice kennedy as being the pivot point but not just because he's the random guy in the middle but because he's actually had a lot to say about these kinds of cases. >> he has. in fact, he wrotehe lt tw decisions involving the juvenile death penalty and life without prison... life in prison without parole for juveniles who do not commit murder. so, yes, he's going to be very pivotal here. the one thing that he seemed concerned about and several other j

mr. stevenson here about the case that he argued before the supreme court having a new crime and punishmentut parole for children as young as 14. i want to turn to jurisprudence more. it's cruel and unusual punishment. those are two very different notions. cruelty on the one and something being unusual. how has the court come to understand that? >> i think you're right. it's a challenging concept that the court has also read into the 8th amendment, this notion that there are evolving standards of decency. so what makes punishment unusual isn't that it's new. it could have been around for a long time. so what they tend to do is to look a lot at the incident of the punishment. if there's a lot of people who have gotten a certain kind of punishment against it being unusual, if there's a lot of states that embrace the punishment, that's an argument that's against being unusual. >> so we were talking about the children with homicides and that most states have never condemned a 14-year-old in prison and that we're the only people in the world that have kind of satisfied that unusual requirement.