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Does race matter when holding children accountable for crimes? Are judgments toward colored children harsher than those for whites? Apparently it is so, reveals a new study.

According to research conducted by Stanford Psychologists, when juvenile offenders are black, people are more willing to give harsher punishments to them.

"These results highlight the fragility of protections for juveniles when race is in play," says Aneeta Rattan, postdoctoral research scholar in psychology at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which appears this week in the journal PloS One.

Children have always been protected and treated liberally when it comes to holding them accountable to crimes. The reason is that children do not have impulse control like how adults do, and neither can reason their deeds like adults. Death penalty for juveniles was barred by the Supreme Court in 2010. Even at the moment, the court is considering two cases of two juviniles who were involved in murder and sentenced to life without parole. The court is considering if it should further limit harsh sentences for young people.

"The statistics out there indicate that there are racial disparities in sentencing juveniles who have committed severe crimes," says Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor of psychology and senior author of the study. "That led us to wonder, to what extent does race play a role in how people think about juvenile status?" she adds.

For the study 735 white Americans were surveyed. Apparently, only white Americans were made the particiapnts because they constitute the larger part of juries.

The participants were presented with the case of a 14-year-old male with 17 prior juvenile convictions who brutally raped an elderly woman. While half of the respondents were told that the offender was black; the other half were told he was white. The color of the child was the only difference between the narrations to the two groups.

After the case was told, the participants were asked following questions:

"To what extent do you support life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles when no one was killed?"

"How much do you believe that juveniles who commit crimes such as these should be considered less blameworthy than an adult who commits a similar crime?"

It seems participants who were told that the offender was a black, strongly recommended a life in prison without parole for juveniles than those who thought the offender was white.

"The fact that imagining a particular target could influence your perceptions of a policy that would affect an entire class of people, we think, is pretty important to know," Eberhardt says.

Also, the study notes that there was no difference in responses of people who were not racially biased and those of participants who were biased.

"That suggests they believe black offenders will likely be the same when they're adults but white offenders are in a developmental period and could be very different adults. This starts breaking down the protections against the most severe sentences," says co-author Carol Dweck, professor of psychology.

The authors hope that the findings of the research might be able to kick start a discussion and probably spread an awareness on how race affects sentencing of juveniles.

"We think about the legal world as having rules and you apply the rules equally to everyone," says Rattan. "What we're really showing is that there's a potential for that to not be the case."

"And that the rules themselves may be biased already," Dweck adds, Stranford University news reported.